The  Chvistian  Taith 
?tfuOlb  Testament 


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THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH   AND 
THE   OLD   TESTAMENT 


Theology  of  the  Old  Testament. 
By  C.  Piepenbring.  (^I'75) 

"  No  trace  of  controversial  temper.     Facts  are  stated 
with  brevity  and  without  exaggeration." 

—  Independent. 


The  litigious  Value  of  the  Old  Testament, 
By  Ambrose  W.  Vernon.  (90  cents  net) 
"  Concise,  clear,  and  interesting." 

—  Biblical  World. 

The  Bible  as  Literature, 
By  R.  G.  Moulton,  and  Others.      (^1.50) 

"  Opens  an  interesting  field  of  research." 

—  Presbyterian. 


The  Prophets  and  the  Promise, 
By  Willis  J.  Beecher.  (^2.00  net) 

"  An  illuminative  study  of  Messianic  tradition." 

Isaiah, 
By  H.  G.  Mitchell.  (^2.00) 

A  study  of  Chapters  I-XII. 


EJomas  g.  €:r0trien  ^  C0.,  Nein  gork 


THE  CHRISTIAN  FAITH 

AND   THE 

OLD  TESTAMENT 


BY 

JOHN    M.   THOMAS 

PRESIDENT   OF  MIDDLEBURY   COLLEGE 


i     3  3  •       »      , 

'        '       '  >         »     1' 


NEW  YORK 

THOMAS   Y.   CROWELL  &   CO. 

PUBLISHERS 


^'S 


Copyright,  1908, 

By  THOMAS  Y.   CROWELL  &  CO. 

Published,  April,  1908. 


V. 


^0 

THE  CONGREGATION  OF  THE  ARLINGTON 

AVENUE  PRESBYTERIAN  CHURCH 

East  Orange,  N.J. 

IN   SINCERE  GRATITUDE  FOR  INCREASING  LIBERTY 

OF  PULPIT   UTTERANCE 

AND 

TO  THE  FRIENDS  OF  MIDDLEBURY  COLLEGE 

IN  EARNEST  HOPE 


235432 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 

in  2007  with  funding  from 

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CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface ix 

I.  The  Christian  Faith  and  the  Old  Testa- 
ment   .......         I 

Jesus  the  Man  of  Faith    ....        2 

The  Old  Testament  the  First  Scriptures 
of  the  Religion  of  Jesus        ...         7 

The  Advantage  to  Christianity  from  its 
Connection  with  the  Old  Testament      .       12 

The  Injury  to  Christianity  from  its  Adop- 
tion of  the  Old  Testament    ...       26 

The  Old  Testament  and  the  Faith  of 
To-day 42 

II.     The  Difficulty  of  Understanding  the  Old 

Testament 51 

III.     The  Five  Points  of  Old  Testament  Criticism      66 
The    Trustworthiness    of  the    Historical 

Books 70 

The  Origin  of  Deuteronomy  in  the  Time 

of  Josiah 77 

The  Four  Sources  of  the  Hexateuch         .       82 
The  Gradual  Growth  of  Hebrew  Legisla- 
tion       87 

The  Work  of  the  Prophets  in  the  Religion 

of  Israel 90 

vii 


viii  CONTENTS 

PAGE 

IV.     A  Sketch  of  the  Development  of  the  Religion 

of  Israel  to  the  Time  of  Amos       .         .       95 

V.     The  Heightening  of  Tradition  in  the  Old 

Testament 120 


PREFACE 

So  long  as  Christianity  remains  a  vital 
religion,  the  Old  Testament  will  be  a  book 
of  living  interest  and  importance.  The 
Scriptures  of  the  Hebrew  people  permeate 
too  deeply  the  distinctively  Christian  writ- 
ings, and  have  affected  too  seriously  the 
fortunes  of  Christianity  and  the  standards  of 
Christian  conduct,  for  the  adherents  of  the 
religion  of  Jesus  ever  to  put  them  aside  as 
none  of  their  concern.  The  following  pages 
are  an  endeavor  to  set  forth  some  of  the 
more  important  consequences,  both  for  good 
and  evil,  of  the  inclusion  of  Hebrew  writings 
in  the  Christian  Bible,  and  to  illustrate  a  few 
of  the  practical  consequences  of  the  newer 
views  concerning  the  Old  Testament.  No 
opinion  could  be  more  mistaken  than  that 
which  regards  the  criticism  of  the  older  books 
of  the  Bible  as  an  affair  of  antiquarians  and 
pedants,  without  influence  upon  practical 
life.      The   truth   is   that   the   researches  of 


X  PREFACE 

students  on  these  subjects  are  bound  to  exert 
serious  influence  upon  current  piety.  The 
author  believes  that  this  influence,  on  the 
whole,  will  be  found  to  be  for  good,  and  he 
trusts  that  his  pages  will  not  only  increase 
information  on  topics  of  intrinsic  interest,  but 
also  open  the  way  for  the  achievement  of 
larger  rehgious  good.  Attempt  is  made  to 
show  why  many  readers  find  it  difficult  to 
grasp  the  message  of  the  Old  Testament, 
and  to  present  the  salient  facts  of  the  modern 
understanding  of  the  book,  which  has  opened 
anew  the  eyes  of  many  to  its  beauty  and  its 
power. 

Students  will  note  the  indebtedness  of  the 
author  to  many  recent  writers,  especially  to 
Harnack's  "  History  of  Dogma  "  in  Chapter  I, 
and  to  Wellhausen's  "  Israelitische  und  Jii- 
dische  Geschichte"  in  Chapter  IV.  The 
editors  of  The  Independent  and  The  Homiletic 
Review  have  kindly  granted  permission  to 
make  use  of  material  which  has  appeared  in 
their  columns. 

MiDDLEBURY,  VERMONT, 


THE  CHRISTIAN  FAITH 
AND  THE  OLD  TESTAMENT 

CHAPTER  I 

THE    CHRISTIAN    FAITH    AND    THE    OLD 
TESTAMENT 

The  subject  of  the  following  essay  is  the 
relation  of  the  faith  which  came  into  the  world 
through  the  life  and  teaching  of  Jesus  of  Naza- 
reth to  the  Old  Testament,  not  in  its  origin, 
but  in  its  subsequent  history.  The  attempt 
is  made  to  show  how  the  Galilean  faith  has 
been  affected  by  the  literature  with  which  from 
the  first  it  has  had  an  intimate  connection ;  how 
it  has  been  protected,  guarded,  and  preserved 
in  life  by  it,  and  yet  on  the  other  hand  modified 
and  transformed  by  its  union  with  that  litera- 
ture, misunderstood,  and  misapplied  through 
the    influence    of    Hebrew   writings,    hindered 


2  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

in  its  free  course,  diminished  in  its  might,  be- 
cause of  the  handicap  thus  imposed;  and 
finally  how  the  understanding  of  the  Old  Tes- 
tament, which  is  open  to  modern  men,  sets 
free  the  faith  of  the  Nazarene  for  larger  power 
and  even  more  beneficent  work  than  it  has  ac- 
complished hitherto.  The  Bible  of  the  Chris- 
tian religion  consists  of  the  Old  and  New 
Testaments ;  how  has  the  New  been  influenced 
by  the  presence  of  the  Old  alongside  it  ?  Has  it 
been  an  advantage  or  an  injury?  If  partly 
gain,  and  in  some  respects  loss,  what  has  been 
the  service  ?  and  what  the  damage  ?  Through 
the  marvellous  new  light  that  has  been  shed  in 
recent  days  upon  the  Old  Testament,  are  men 
in  better  position  to  receive  only  good  from  it, 
and  to  appreciate  more  worthily  the  newer  rev- 
elation and  the  faith  which  it  enshrines  ?  These 
are  the  questions  proposed  for  discussion. 

JESUS  THE  MAN  OF  FAITH 

If  one  were  asked  to  describe  in  a  single 
phrase  the  founder  of  the  Christian  religion, 
one  would  do  well  to  call  him  a  man  of  faith. 


AND   THE  OLD   TESTAMENT  3 

His  tender,  beautiful  love  is  not  to  be  forgotten, 
nor  his  loyal  devotion  to  truth  and  to  his  friends. 
His  gentle  kindness  and  sympathy,  his  magnifi- 
cent courage,  his  marvellous  insight  into  the 
things  of  God  and  the  secrets  of  the  human 
heart,  enter  into  the  might  he  has  won  over 
our  lives.  But  the  source  of  these,  and  of 
every  quality  for  which  we  honor  him,  was  his 
quiet,  unassuming,  but  unconquerable  faith 
in  God  as  his  heavenly  Father,  his  Friend  and 
Helper  every  step  of  his  way.  He  loved  im- 
partially and  to  the  uttermost  because  of  his 
faith  in  the  God  who  maketh  His  sun  to  rise 
on  the  evil  and  on  the  good.  He  was  a  friend 
to  the  publicans  because  he  felt  deeply  in  his 
soul  that  God  pitied  them.  He  looked  out 
upon  the  fields,  and  they  spoke  to  him,  not 
of  agriculture,  although  he  noticed  its  processes, 
nor  of  beauty  merely,  though  he  was  not  in- 
different to  the  lilies'  fairness,  but  of  God, 
God's  loving  care  for  all  his  creatures.  He 
watched  the  fisher  at  his  nets,  the  woman  with 
the  household  measure,  the  children  in  the 
marketplace,  and  they  were  to  him  but  sym- 


4  THE   CHRISTIAN  FAITH 

bols  of  his  Father's  truth.  The  whole  world 
was  eloquent  to  him  of  God.  The  pure  and 
loving  Father  was  to  him  the  first  reality  of  life, 
more  obtrusive  in  his  thought  than  the  hills 
about  his  native  village.  His  home  was  in  the 
spiritual  realm.  He  was  quickly  done  with 
the  things  of  Caesar,  that  again  he  might  ren- 
der to  God  the  things  that  are  God's.  He  trod 
the  wretched  highway  from  Jerusalem  to  Jeri- 
cho, and  gave  not  a  thought  to  its  betterment. 
He  saw  the  miserable  sewage  disposal  in  the 
valley  of  Hinnom,  but  made  no  plans  for  its 
abatement.  He  was  not  a  social  reformer. 
There  is  no  evidence  that  the  oppression  of  the 
Roman  angered  him  in  the  least.  The  cruelty 
of  Pilate  in  his  murder  of  Galileans  came  into 
his  mind,  but  he  employed  the  incident  to  en- 
force the  responsibility  of  the  individual,  not 
to  increase  national  feeling.  Judas  Macca- 
baeus  was  a  more  earnest  patriot  than  Jesus  of 
Nazareth.  Patriotism  was  not  his  field,  nor 
sanitary  engineering,  nor  road  building,  nor 
political  or  social  science,  nor  any  other  hu- 
man interest,  however  important  and  excellent, 


AND  THE   OLD  TESTAMENT  5 

save  the  relation  of  the  soul  of  a  man  to  the 
spirit  of  love  that  is  over  all  things. 

The  religion  of  Jesus  was  faith,  the  personal 
attachment  of  the  heart  to  God.  Among  a 
people  burdened  with  religion  as  a  system  of 
endless  laws  and  regulations,  or  conceiving  it 
now  and  then  under  the  summons  of  some  enthu- 
siast as  a  means  of  political  enfranchisement 
and  material  prosperity,  he  preached  a  mes- 
sage to  the  soul  of  the  individual.  He  gave 
forth  no  doctrine  as  a  rule  and  standard  of 
faith;  he  enunciated  no  laws  as  the  binding 
statutes  of  a  new  society.  His  teaching  was 
vital  and  inspirational,  not  dogmatic.  His 
commandments  were  such  only  in  form;  in 
essence  they  were  principles  and  truths  of  the 
spiritual  life.  He  was  neither  a  lawgiver  nor 
a  teacher  of  laws,  but  a  messenger  of  life.  He 
taught  the  religion  of  the  heart.  He  brought 
men  out  into  the  open,  out  into  the  clear,  free 
air  of  personal  responsibility,  and  the  right  and 
duty  of  a  man  to  make  his  own  laws,  and  form 
his  own  ideals,  and  live  his  own  life  in  the  fear 
of  God  alone.     ''Why  judge  ye  not  of  your- 


6  THE  CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

selves  that  which  is  right?"  is  a  neglected  text 
of  the  Gospels,  but  surely  one  of  the  greatest. 
Doubtless  the  Master  would  hurl  it  at  some  of 
his  modern  disciples,  sometimes,  when  they  ap- 
peal to  him  for  dictation  on  every  little  matter 
of  conduct  and  opinion,  and  lean  cowardly  on 
him  for  all  their  views  of  truth  and  right.  In 
the  lonely  wilderness  he  fought  with  the  powers 
of  darkness  for  his  own  truth ;  why  should  not 
we  follow  him  there?  Jesus  would  have  no 
man  a  slave,  not  even  in  thought.  He  sought 
to  make  men  free,  and  his  religion  is  a  religion 
of  freedom,  no  system  of  laws,  no  system  of 
ceremonies,  not  even  Apostolic  ceremonies, 
coming  between  the  free  spirit  of  man  and  the 
God  whom  alone  he  worships. 

This  was  the  truth  of  Jesus  Christ,  and  his 
gift  to  the  world.  It  was  founded  on  his  faith 
in  his  Father,  the  faith  which  was  the  mystery 
of  his  being.  His  companions  were  dull  to 
his  truth;  the  populace  did  not  at  all  under- 
stand it ;  the  learned  and  influential  of  his  na- 
tion scouted  it ;  the  Roman  would  not  take  the 
trouble  to  inquire  into  it:  but  he  had  seen  it, 


AND   THE   OLD   TESTAMENT  7 

caught  the  vision  of  it  a  thousand  times  each 
day,  and  built  his  manhood  upon  it, —  "  and  the 
rain  descended,  and  the  floods  came,  and  the 
winds  blew,  and  beat  upon  that  house,  and  it 
fell  not,  for  it  was  founded  on  a  rock."  ^ 

THE    OLD   TESTAMENT   THE    FIRST   SCRIPTURES 
OF  THE   RELIGION   OF   JESUS 

Jesus  was  a  Jew,  and  was  faithful  unto  death 
to  the  religious  system  of  his  fathers.  Within 
the  circle  of  Judaism  he  was  remarkably  free 
and  bold,  criticising  the  practices  and  doctrines 
of  the  leaders  of  his  nation  with  great  severity, 
and  with  his  magnificent  "I  say  unto  you" 
practically  supplanting  many  of  the  teachings 
which  had  been  received  by  them  of  old  time  ; 
and  yet  beyond  the  circle  of  the  Jewish  system 
he  was  unwilling  to  go.  "Think  not  that  I 
came  to  destroy  the  law  or  the  prophets," 
he  said  to  the  fiery  spirits  who  interpreted  him 

^  Many  of  the  parables  take  on  new  meaning  when 
studied  as  revelations  of  the  Master's  own  personal  life, 
rather  than  as  predictions  of  the  distant  future  or  teaching 
for  the  Church. 


8  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

as  a  revolutionary  innovator,  "I  came  not  to 
destroy,  but  to  fulfil."  He  had  a  sublime  con- 
ception of  the  worth  of  the  truth  which  God 
had  vouchsafed  to  him,  and  not  even  his  gentle 
meekness  prevented  him  from  declaring  that  a 
greater  than  Jonah  had  been  sent  to  his  genera- 
tion, and  that  the  children  of  his  kingdom 
excelled  in  privilege  the  last  and  most  favored 
of  the  prophets ;  and  he  saw  Satan  fall  as  light- 
ning from  heaven  when  his  disciples  grasped 
his  message.  Yet  he  said  of  his  Golden  Rule, 
an  utterance  which  declared  his  very  heart, 
''This  is  the  law  and  the  prophets."  He  was 
not  consciously  founding  a  new  religion;  he 
was  interpreting  and  enforcing  the  religion  of 
his  fathers.  To  the  last  he  was  a  pious  ad- 
herent in  his  own  thought  of  the  God  of  Abra- 
ham, of  Isaac,  and  of  Jacob.  "O  Jerusalem! 
Jerusalem !  how  often  would  I  have  gathered 
thee  together!"  tells  the  pathetic  endeavor 
of  his  life.  "Go  not  into  any  way  of  the 
Gentiles"  was  his  instruction  and  his  practice. 
He  read  in  the  Scriptures  of  his  people  a  far 
nobler  and  more  spiritual  faith  than  was  taught 


AND   THE   OLD   TESTAMENT  9 

by  the  scribes,  and  he  gave  his  life  in  the  interest 
of  that  faith,  which  we  call  Christianity,  but 
which  he  called  ''the  law  and  the  prophets." 
In  the  exercise  of  that  sovereign  freedom 
which  our  Master  has  bequeathed  to  us  we 
may  declare  him  more  of  a  revolutionary  than 
he  pronounced  himself.  To  us  the  Golden 
Rule  is  not  the  law  and  the  prophets,  but  some- 
thing very  much  more  and  better.  To  us  the 
Sermon  on  the  Mount  is  not  the  mere  comple- 
ment and  interpretation  of  the  teaching  of 
Moses ;  it  is  the  charter  of  a  new  religion.  But 
this  is  a  truth  which  came  only  gradually  to 
light.  The  first  disciples  had  no  inkling  of  it, 
for  they  went  piously  to  the  temple  and  per- 
formed scrupulously  all  their  obligations  as 
members  of  the  Jewish  commonwealth.  In 
reality  they  differed  from  their  brother  Jews 
by  tenets  radically  new  and  by  a  spirit  as  novel 
as  it  was  beautiful,  but  in  their  thought  their 
sole  divergence  was  in  their  acceptance  of  Jesus 
as  the  Messiah.  Our  Lord's  evangel  first 
proved  itself  something  new  by  the  men  it 
made  and  the  joy  it  created,  and  only  afterwards 


10  THE  CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

was  it  recognized  and  declared  a  new  religious 
system. 

In  Paul  the  old  and  the  new  are  strangely 
blended.  The  pride  of  the  Jew  still  lingers 
in  his  accents,  and  his  racial  consciousness  is 
never  lost.  He  argues  as  a  Pharisee  with  the 
Galatian  disciples,  while  he  seeks  to  impress 
them  with  a  faith  utterly  diverse  from  Phari- 
saism. He  declares  that  old  things  are  passed 
away,  that  all  things  are  become  new ;  and  yet 
he  reasons  of  God  in  terms  of  the  clay  and  the 
potter,  as  if  Jesus  had  never  taught  the  Father- 
hood. '*We  are  the  true  Israel,"  he  says  to  his 
fellow-Christians,  asserting  with  all  possible 
vehemence  the  newness  of  life  through  Christ, 
yet  calling  it  by  the  name  of  the  narrow  faith 
of  his  youth.  No  one  can  be  blind  to  the  fact 
that  Paul  was  undermining  the  religious  sys- 
tem of  his  fathers,  that  he  was  the  most  violent 
and  effective  of  radicals;  yet  we  must  credit 
his  assertion  that  he  felt  himself  the  truest  con- 
servator of  the  old. 

Christianity  did  not  come  to  full  self-con- 
sciousness as  a  detached  organism  until  after 


AND  THE   OLD   TESTAMENT  II 

the  days  of  Paul.  It  is  only  in  the  Fourth 
Gospel,  in  the  New  Testament,  that  we  read 
of  ^'the  Jews"  as  a  detached,  separate,  and 
hostile  body.  Long  before  that  the  Old  Testa- 
ment had  become  fixed  and  established  as  the 
Bible  of  the  disciples  of  Jesus.  The  Master 
himself  had  nourished  his  soul  upon  the  Scrip- 
tures of  his  fathers,  and  his  reverent  attitude 
toward  them  and  practical,  vital  use  of  them, 
taught  his  friends  to  treasure  them.  The 
earliest  preaching  of  the  Church  was  based  upon 
the  Old  Testament.  Paul  is  but  an  example 
of  the  entire  company  of  believers  in  his  con- 
stant appeal  to  the  law  and  the  prophets.  The 
proof  from  the  Scriptures  that  Jesus  was  the 
Christ  was  the  first  apologetic,  and  in  the  meet- 
ing-places of  the  Christians  the  writings  of 
Moses  and  David  were  not  less  honored  nor 
less  faithfully  studied  than  in  the  synagogues 
of  the  strictest  Jews. 

Thus  the  Old  Testament  became  a  Christian 
book,  and  a  full  century  before  there  was  a 
Christian  canon  to  place  beside  it  the  conviction 
was  established  that    the  Hebrew  Scriptures 


12  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

testified  of  Jesus  Christ.^  Looking  back  upon 
the  history,  we  cannot  see  how  it  could  have 
been  otherwise.  Old  things  do  not  pass  away 
and  all  things  become  new  by  the  decision  of  one 
individual  or  the  resolution  of  a  council.  Al- 
ways men  take  over  their  old  furniture  into  their 
new  home.  Our  religion  was  the  response  of 
men  to  the  stirrings  of  the  spirit  of  God,  and 
those  to  whom  it  was  intrusted,  being  Jewish 
men,  could  not  do  other  than  take  Isaiah  and 
David  with  them  into  their  new  home  of  faith. 
Necessary  though  this  action  was,  it  had 
important  consequences  for  the  new  religion, 
which  we  are  now  to  examine. 

THE    ADVANTAGE    TO    CHRISTIANITY    FROM    ITS 
CONNECTION   WITH   THE    OLD   TESTAMENT 

There  was  certainly  one  treasure  of  price- 
less value  which  the  early  Christians  secured  in 
their  appropriation  of  the  Hebrew  Scriptures, 
and  that  was  the  moral  law,  the  Old  Testa- 
ment's clear,  emphatic  enunciation  of  the  fun- 
damental requirements  of  right,  together  with 

^  John  5  39. 


AND   THE   OLD   TESTAMENT  13 

enthusiasm  and  elevation  of  spirit  in  all  mat- 
ters pertaining  to  morals.  To  be  sure,  the  Jews 
at  the  opening  of  our  era  were  not  all  paragons 
of  virtue.  The  thief  and  the  robber,  the  ex- 
tortioner and  the  woman  that  had  had  five 
husbands,  meet  us  on  the  pages  of  the  New 
Testament.  The  sins  of  the  chosen  people  in 
Christ's  time  were  not  exclusively  the  religious 
vices  of  the  "unco  guid,"  but  also  the  common, 
dirty  sins  of  the  flesh  and  the  evils  that  fasten 
invariably  to  the  greed  of  gain.  Neverthe- 
less the  Jew  had  the  advantage  over  the  heathen 
in  the  possession  of  the  oracles  of  God,  and  he 
was  liable  at  every  turn  of  his  evil  way  to  be 
met  by  stern  rebuke,  by  the  precept  of  his  fathers 
which  he  had  grossly  violated,  by  a  word  of  in- 
tense moral  enthusiasm  from  some  old-time 
prophet,  in  which  the  right  was  made  as  com- 
manding as  it  is  possible  to  be  in  human  speech. 
This  storehouse  of  moral  precept,  this  battery 
of  ethical  force,  the  Christian  disciples  made 
their  own.  They  took  seriously  the  idea  that 
they  were  the  true  Israel,  and  they  applied  to 
themselves    every    commandment    and    every 


14  THE  CHRISTIAN  FAITH 

summons  to  holy  living  which  they  found  in  the 
Old  Covenant. 

Toward  the  close  of  the  primitive  era  Aris- 
tides  the  Apologist  made  the  following  defence 
of  his  Christian  brothers  to  the  Roman  em- 
peror. "The  Christians,"  he  said,  ''have  re- 
ceived the  commandments,  which  they  have 
engraved  on  their  minds  and  keep  in  the  hope 
and  expectation  of  the  world  to  come :  where- 
fore, they  do  not  commit  adultery  or  fornica- 
tion, they  do  not  bear  false  witness,  they  do  not 
deny  a  deposit,  nor  covet  what  is  not  theirs. 
They  honor  father  and  mother:  they  do  good 
to  their  neighbors,  and  when  they  are  judges 
they  judge  uprightly.  They  do  not  worship 
idols  made  in  the  form  of  man :  and  whatever 
they  do  not  wish  that  others  should  do  to  them, 
they  do  not  practise  toward  others."  ^  One 
recognizes  the  Golden  Rule,  but  equally  clear 
is  the  influence  in  clause  after  clause  of  the 
Old  Testament  law ;  and  it  is  not  too  much  to 
say  that  the  basis  of  the  moral  excellence  by 

^  Quoted  in  Dobschiitz,  "  Christian  Life  in  the  Primi- 
tive Church,"  p.  XXV. 


AND   THE   OLD   TESTAMENT  15 

which  Aristides  thinks  to  defend  the  Chris- 
tians is  the  ethical  teaching  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment. 

When  we  remember  that  despite  all  its  apol- 
ogies and  philosophies  and  purely  religious 
benefits  Christianity  has  succeeded  chiefly, 
and  been  of  principal  use,  through  the  honest 
men  and  pure  women  it  has  produced,  and  when 
we  remember  also  that  much  of  the  moral  in- 
struction of  the  New  Testament  is  but  the  ethics 
of  the  Old  transferred  to  the  New,  we  shall  ad- 
mit that  we  are  not  likely  to  overestimate  the 
service  of  the  Hebrew  Scriptures  to  Christian- 
ity in  this  particular. 

The  new  faith  had  also  many  a  spiritual, 
purely  religious,  good  from  the  older  teaching. 
It  comforted  the  troubled  and  consoled  the  sor- 
rowing with  the  words  of  the  God  of  Israel  to 
his  ancient  people.  It  declared  the  help  and 
guidance  of  the  Almighty  in  all  the  affairs  of  life, 
his  loving  kindness  and  tender  mercy  toward 
all  who  put  their  trust  in  him,  in  the  same  old- 
time  accents.  The  music  of  the  Psalter  accom- 
panied the  gracious  words  of  Jesus  in  instilling 


l6  THE  CHRISTIAN  FAITH 

courage  and  hope  into  the  Christians  of  the  days 
of  Nero,  and,  taught  not  less  by  the  Twenty- 
Third  Psalm  than  by  the  Master's  own  words, 
they  chiselled  in  the  catacombs  the  rude  figure 
of  the  shepherd  and  the  lamb.  From  the 
earliest  Christian  times  the  pleading  lines  — 

"Cast  me  not  away  from  thy  presence, 
And  take  not  thy  Holy  Spirit  from  me" 

have  wrought  with  the  petition,  "Forgive  us 
our  debts,  as  we  forgive  our  debtors,"  and  with 
the  parable  of  the  publican  smiting  his  breast 
in  the  far  corner  of  the  temple,  in  the  produc- 
tion of  the  humble  and  contrite  Christian  heart. 
Through  the  Old  Testament  the  new  reli- 
gion received  also  a  noble  and  exalted  doctrine 
of  God  as  the  Father  and  Creator  of  the  uni- 
verse. In  lofty  eloquence  the  Christian  proph- 
ets and  teachers  proclaimed  the  monotheism 
of  the  Old  Testament,  the  God  who  appoints 
the  day  and  the  night,  at  whose  command  sun, 
moon,  and  stars  roll  on  in  harmony  without  the 
slightest  deviation.^    It  was  new  doctrine  to  a 

^  "First  Epistle  of  Clement,"  Ch.  22. 


AND  THE   OLD   TESTAMENT  17 

populace  nourished  on  the  classic  mythology ; 
and  not  a  little  of  the  elevating  influence  of 
early  Christianity  must  in  fairness  be  credited 
to  the  monotheistic  interpretation  of  the  world, 
which  Christian  teachers  claimed  as  their  own 
truth,  but  which  in  reality  was  as  old  as  Amos. 
By  its  adoption  of  the  Hebrew  Scriptures  the 
religion  of  Jesus  secured  further  the  inestimable 
advantage  of  the  union  of  the  sense  of  age  and 
permanence  with  the  enthusiasm  of  a  new  reve- 
lation. Any  one  can  feel  the  mighty  seething 
of  the  revolutionary  spirit  as  he  reads  the  pages 
of  the  New  Testament,  and  catch  the  pervading 
consciousness  of  living  in  the  day  of  the  world's 
new  birth ;  but  scarcely  less  obtrusive  in  early 
Christian  life  is  the  feeling  of  union  and  co- 
operation with  the  world-old  processes  of  the 
Creator  of  the  heavens  and  the  earth.  The 
men  of  the  early  Church  grew  great  with  the 
faith  that  the  whole  drama  of  creation  and  of 
history  to  their  time  was  but  the  prologue  to  the 
movement  of  which  they  were  the  leaders. 
Their  Master  was  the  "lamb  slain  from  before 
the  foundation  of  the  world";  he  was  the  force 


l8  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

spiritually  effective  at  the  time  of  the  exodus 
from  Egypt ;^  he  was  "before  Abraham," 
and  the  literal  descendants  of  the  patriarch 
were  looked  down  upon  as  a  modern  people 
by  men  who  regarded  their  own  ancestry  as 
going  back  to  the  time  when  the  morning  stars 
sang  together  for  joy.  The  Greeks  were  but 
infants  in  their  sight.  Thus  the  Christians 
walked  the  earth  with  a  sense  of  the  nobility 
of  their  inheritance,  with  conviction  of  its 
permanence  as  the  oldest  established  institu- 
tion of  the  world ;  and  they  united  this  feeling 
of  stability  and  grandeur  with  the  passion  of 
a  new  day  of  revelation  which  was  burning  in 
their  soul. 

We  may  feel  that  the  early  Christians  pur- 
sued the  subject  of  their  antiquity  with  the  zeal 
that  is  commonly  and  humanly  characteristic 
of  all  searchers  of  pedigree,  but  it  is  beyond 
question  that  the  Old  Testament  gave  them  an 
invaluable  sense  of  continuity  with  the  life  of 
the  past.  It  bound  them  to  God's  long  process 
in  the  making  of  upright  men,  and  tied  them 

1  I  Cor.  lo  4. 


AND   THE   OLD   TESTAiMENT  19 

to  the  realities  of  the  common  earth.  The 
latter  is  a  matter  of  greatest  importance.  The 
Old  Testament  is  a  plain  man's  book,  and  it 
deals  with  topics  of  everyday  importance  in 
the  common  life  of  this  planet.  The  burdens 
of  the  poor  and  the  oppressed  are  its  burden, 
the  cry  of  the  orphan  is  its  cry,  and  the  prayer 
of  the  ordinary  mortal,  who  knows  his  trans- 
gression and  whose  sin  is  ever  before  him,  is  its 
prayer.  What  we  have  called  its  history  con- 
sists largely  of  the  stories  of  fireside  and  hearth. 
Its  prophecy  is  but  the  straight  speech  of  men 
fused  to  white  heat  by  moral  passion  to  men 
who  were  their  neighbors  and  companions  in 
business  and  toil.  Its  philosophy,  if  such  we 
may  call  Job  and  the  Proverbs,  is  the  non- 
technical observation  of  common  men,  in  the 
forms  and  language  of  the  family  living  room, 
on  the  questions  which  rise  up  from  the  simplest 
life;  and  the  solutions  are  not  philosophical 
explanations,  but  simple,  sometimes  illogical, 
conclusions  of  men  of  tact  and  good  sense. 

Revolutions  always  threaten  to  destroy  them- 
selves, and  especially  revolutions  coupled  with 


20  THE  CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

the  flaming  of  religious  zeal.  Our  old  world 
refuses  to  be  reformed  in  a  minute,  and  they 
who  undertake  the  task  are  usually  consumed 
in  the  fruitless  fire  they  have  kindled.  Subse- 
quent generations  look  back  upon  their  efforts, 
marvel  at  the  amount  of  truth  they  perceived, 
and  wonder  how  so  much  of  real  insight,  as 
later  recognized  by  the  world,  could  have 
failed  of  success.  This  is  to  forget  that 
enthusiasm  can  serve  only  as  it  yields  itself  to 
die,  while  the  truth  which  lives  to  bless  continued 
generations  must  fit  itself  in  humble  patience 
into  the  life  in  whose  modest  rise  it  will  be 
content. 

Few  movements  the  world  has  seen  have 
run  greater  peril  of  dissolution  in  the  wild 
exuberance  of  fanatical  enthusiasm  than  the 
evangel  which  startled  Galilee  with  the  cry, 
"Repent  ye,  the  kingdom  of  God  is  at  hand." 
The  ambition  of  the  sons  of  Zebedee  to  sit  on 
thrones  and  judge  the  tribes  of  Israel  will  be 
remembered.  Nothing  is  more  certain  than 
that  after  the  death  of  Jesus  the  disciples  watched 
daily  for  his  return  to  earth,  in  splendor  and 


AND  THE   OLD  TESTAMENT  21 

great  magnificence,  and  an  ensuing  dramatic 
assize  of  all  nations  and  peoples,  together  with 
a  new  heaven  and  a  new  earth,  the  old  creation 
melting  away  in  fervent  heat.  Even  Paul  was 
not  indifferent  to  such  doctrine,  was  himself 
caught  up  into  the  third  heaven,  and  could 
reason  at  times  of  heights  and  depths,  prin- 
cipalities and  powers,  the  familiar  objects  of 
current  mystical  enthusiasm.  It  is  not  to  be 
forgotten  that  the  early  Christians  placed 
alongside  the  parables  of  Jesus  and  the  moral 
precepts  of  Paul  the  grotesque  imaginings  of  the 
Apocalypse,  with  its  horses  and  dragons  and 
weird  and  terrifying  spectacles.  In  some  sec- 
tions of  the  Church  the  white  and  red  horses 
of  the  Revelation  enjoyed  greater  vogue  than 
the  parable  of  the  prodigal  son  or  Paul's  poem 
on  love.  We  children  of  the  modern  world 
pass  over  the  spectacular  and  apocalyptic  and 
fix  upon  the  moral  and  quietly  religious ;  but  the 
tendency  of  our  brothers  in  the  initial  centuries 
was  just  the  reverse. 

It  was  here  that  the  Old  Testament  rendered 
stupendous  service.    It  was  the  Bible  of  the 


22  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

Church,  the  only  infallible  rule  of  faith  and 
practice  for  Christian  lives  until  at  least  the 
middle  of  the  second  century ;  and  while  it  con- 
tained the  Apocalypse  of  Daniel,  it  contained 
also,  and  made  much  more  emphatic  and  prom- 
inent, the  law  of  the  Tables  of  Stone,  the 
spiritual  and  moral  ardor  of  the  Psalter,  and 
the  stern,  intense  ethical  insistence  of  Israel's 
prophets  of  righteousness.  A  company  of  men 
with  such  a  handbook  of  rational  and  honest 
living  could  not  lose  themselves  entirely  in 
vapid  speculations,  and  that  they  did  not  do  so 
is  the  lasting  honor  of  the  Hebrew  Scriptures. 

Proof  of  this  statement  is  written  clearly  in 
the  fortunes  of  the  Gnostics,  who  rejected  the 
Old  Testament  in  the  supposed  interest  of 
Christianity  itself,  thinking  if  they  could  set  the 
religion  entirely  free  from  Judaism  they  would 
enhance  its  power  and  worth.  That  their 
schools  went  to  pieces  largely  because  of  the 
immorality  that  attached  to  them  evidences 
the  steadying  and  purifying  influence  which 
the  main  body  of  the  Church  received  from  the 
Hebrew  writings. 


AND  THE   OLD   TESTAMENT  23 

The  example  of  Marcion,  who  was  not  strictly 
a  Gnostic,  but  who  like  them  sought  to  purge 
Christianity  of  every  Hebrew  element,  is  simi- 
larly instructive.  One  cannot  refrain  admira- 
tion, in  many  respects,  from  the  arch-heretic 
of  the  second  century,  despite  the  blackness  in 
which  Tertullian  draws  his  portrait.  He  was 
a  layman,  a  wealthy  ship-owner  of  Pontus,  and 
at  the  first  was  an  orthodox  Christian,  recog- 
nized as  such  by  the  Church  at  Rome.  Of- 
fended at  the  legal  and  ceremonial  character 
of  current  Christianity,  and  convinced  by  Paul's 
letters  that  the  Old  Testament  was  not  the 
gospel,  but  "weak  and  beggarly  rudiments," 
he  sought  to  reform  the  Church  on  the  basis 
of  what  he  conceived  to  be  Paul's  teaching. 
He  held  that  faith,  reliance  on  the  unmerited 
grace  of  God  revealed  in  Christ,  is  the  essence 
of  the  gospel,  and  believing  that  the  Old  Testa- 
ment was  a  stumbling-block  in  the  way  of  this 
truth,  he  threw  it  overboard,  and  taught  that 
the  God  of  Jesus  was  a  distinct  and  different 
being  from  the  God  of  Abraham  and  Moses. 
Failing  to  persuade  his  fellow-Christians  of  this 


24  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

view,  he  toiled  unselfishly  and  devotedly  to  build 
up  communities  who  shared  his  doctrine,  spend- 
ing time  and  money  freely  in  the  effort ;  and  de- 
spite all  calumny  never  till  the  day  of  his  death 
despairing  of  the  ambition  to  win  the  Church  as 
a  whole  to  what  he  conceived  to  be  the  pure 
Christian  doctrine.  To  his  followers  he  taught 
brotherly  equality,  freedom  from  all  ceremonies, 
and  strict  evangelical  discipline.  Redemption 
through  Christ,  and  that  alone  the  gospel,  was 
his  watchword ;  and  men  converted  by  his  teach- 
ing were  among  the  noblest  martyrs  whose  blood 
was  the  seed  of  the  Church. 

Had  Christianity  been  able  to  take  some  of 
the  truth  of  Marcion,  and  to  keep  it  to  the 
fore,  how  much  of  the  barrenness  of  ritualism 
and  the  corruption  of  materialistic  dogma  would 
have  been  spared  her !  But  unfortunately  she 
could  not  discern  the  wheat,  since  the  mass  of 
chaff  was  so  great.  Marcion  gave  over  mono- 
theism, the  highest  achievement  of  the  reli- 
gious spirit  before  Jesus,  and  taught  two  Gods : 
the  Jewish  deity,  the  creator  of  the  world, 
jealous,  stern,  and  cruel;  and  the  Christian 


AND   THE   OLD   TESTAMENT  25 

God,  the  Father  of  Jesus,  merciful,  kind,  and 
gentle.  He  threw  away  the  right  of  Chris- 
tianity to  a  place  in  God's  long  process  in  the 
establishment  of  His  kingdom,  and  committed 
the  fatal  error  of  dissociating  his  disciples 
from  the  great  God  who  rules  the  world  and 
holds  all  things  and  forces  in  the  hollow  of  His 
hand.  For  him  there  was  no  fellowship  with 
the  God  of  creation,  with  the  maker  of  the  stars 
and  the  king  of  kings.  His  Church  was  not 
overthrown  by  the  invective  of  Tertullian,  but 
by  its  essential  weakness  and  its  religious  pov- 
erty. A  man  must  meet  the  Master  of  all 
things  and  forces  in  the  universe  in  his  religion, 
or  his  faith  is  vain. 

The  overthrow  of  Marcion  is  a  testimony, 
sufficient  unto  all  time,  that  the  law  and  the 
prophets,  from  which  Jesus  drew  the  nourish- 
ment of  his  soul,  are  an  integral  part  of  the 
faith  that  redeems  in  his  name.  It  is  evidence 
also  of  the  incalculable  service  to  Christianity 
of  the  Old  Testament,  the  book  of  one  God, 
the  Maker  of  heaven  and  earth,  the  book  of 
common  life  and  of  plain  men  and  women, 


26  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

the  book  of  stern  commandments  unto  right, 
whose  reverent  acceptance  is  the  beginning  of 
piety. 

THE     INJURY     TO     CHRISTIANITY     FROM     ITS 
ADOPTION   OF  THE   OLD   TESTAMENT 

The  faith  of  Jesus  did  not  secure  the  Scrip- 
tures of  the  Jews  without  payment  of  a  price. 
In  appropriating  inestimable  advantages  the 
Church  also  received  to  herself  much  which 
has  done  great  harm  in  the  long  course  of  the 
Christian  centuries.  It  is  not  honest  to  recog- 
nize the  good  which  the  Old  Testament  has 
wrought  in  Christianity's  behalf  without  at 
the  same  time  confessing  in  equal  candor  that 
the  Jewish  portion  of  our  Bible  has  been  at 
many  points  a  stumbling-block  to  full  accept- 
ance of  the  gospel,  an  obstacle  in  the  way  of  its 
comprehension,  and  a  hindrance  to  its  largest 
and  most  beneficent  power. 

The  early  Christians  made  the  Old  Testa- 
ment in  its  entirety  a  Christian  book.  They 
did  not  select  here  and  there  a  Christian  text, 
a  bit  of  a  Psalm  or  prophecy,  as  one  is  inclined 


AND   THE  OLD   TESTAMENT  2^ 

to  do  to-day ;  but  they  adopted  the  entire  vol- 
ume, law,  history,  and  prophecy,  as  description 
and  enforcement  of  that  which  had  occurred 
in  Galilee  and  Jerusalem.  They  found  the  life 
of  Jesus,  and  every  truth  which  their  souls  had 
received  through  Jesus,  on  each  page  from 
Genesis  to  Malachi.  They  read  in  Samuel 
and  Kings,  not  the  record  of  a  preparation  for 
the  coming  of  the  Saviour,  but  the  deeds  and 
teachings  of  the  Saviour  who  had  already  come. 
As  Paul  transformed  the  humane  precept  of 
Deuteronomy,  ''Thou  shalt  not  muzzle  the 
ox  when  he  treadeth  out  the  corn,"  into  a  pre- 
scription for  the  adequate  payment  of  pastors 
and  teachers  in  Christian  churches,  denying 
that  it  had  any  other  reference,  so  every  law 
and  institution  was  made  to  bear  a  Christian 
sense.  ''For  us  God  saith  it,"  ^  they  declared, 
not  merely  applying  to  their  situation  that 
which  had  been  said  to  them  of  old  time,  but 
claiming  it  as  primarily  and  exclusively  their 
own.  "  These  are  they  which  testify  of  Christ," 
was  their  conviction,  and  while  the  words  before 

*  I  Cor.  9  lo. 


28  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

them  were  of  Abraham  and  Isaac,  Samson  and 
Saul,  their  minds  were  fixed  on  the  Master  who 
had  given  his  life  in  holy  love. 

For  example,  they  read  in  the  book  of  Zecha- 
riah  the  prophet's  vision  of  the  high  priest  of 
Israel  standing  before  the  Lord,  and  Satan 
standing  at  his  right  hand  to  be  his  adversary.^ 
The  priest  was  clothed  with  filthy  garments, 
but  the  order  came,  "  Take  the  filthy  garments 
from  off  him,  for  behold,  I  have  caused  thine 
iniquity  to  pass  from  thee,  and  I  will  clothe 
thee  with  rich  apparel."  It  was  an  earnest 
man's  encouragement  in  righteousness  to  the 
people  of  his  own  time,  but  the  Church  fathers 
made  it  a  declaration  exclusively  of  the  humilia- 
tion and  subsequent  glory  of  Jesus  of  Naza- 
reth.2 

''They  have  moved  me  to  jealousy  with  that  which  is 
not  God; 
They  have  provoked  me  to  anger  with  their  vanities," 

said  an  old-time  poet  of  the  sins  of  Israel,  but 
Origen  sees  in  the  verse  only  a  prediction  of  the 

^  Zech.  3  I  ff. 

^TertulHan,  "Against  Marcion,"  III,   7. 


AND   THE   OLD   TESTAMENT  29 

calling  of  the  Gentiles/  Similarly  the  two 
goats  spoken  of  in  the  rubric  for  the  day  of 
atonement  are  made  to  declare  before  the  time 
the  divine  and  human  natures  of  Christ.^ 

A  few  examples  give  no  adequate  conception 
of  the  completeness  in  which  every  verse  was 
made  to  bear  a  Christian  sense.  The  fathers 
found  no  narrative  so  simple,  no  text  so  tied 
to  particular  circumstances,  no  chapter  ap- 
parently so  far  removed  from  all  possible  refer- 
ence to  Jesus,  that  it  was  not  made  to  refer  to 
some  portion  of  the  Christian  message.  "  Christ 
always  spoke  in  the  prophets,"  ^  Tertullian 
declared,  and  this  indeed  was  the  feeling  of  all. 
Augustine  even  said,  "  God  so  accounted  of  the 
Patriarchs,  and  at  that  time  made  them  such 
heralds  of  His  Son,  that  not  only  in  what  they 
said,  but  in  what  they  did,  or  what  happened 
to  them,  Christ  is  sought,  Christ  is  found."  ^ 

The  Old  Testament  was  to  them  a  revela- 
tion of  past,  present,  and  future.^    It  was  their 

*  "Against  Celsus,"  II,  78. 
2  Tertullian,  ibid.,  Ill,  7. 

^  "Against  Marcion,"  III,  6. 

*  "Sermon  on  the  Temptation  of  Abraham,"  sec.  7. 
^  Harnack,  "Dogmengeschichte,"  I,  p.  166. 


30  THE  CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

book  of  devotion  and  practical  guidance,  as 
well  as  their  arsenal  of  texts  against  unbe- 
lievers. They  found  in  it  what  they  wished 
to  find,  for  all  conceivable  purposes ;  and  every 
question  of  doctrine  and  conduct  was  deter- 
mined by  appeal  to  a  passage  from  the  proph- 
ets, turned  to  a  Christian  purpose  by  allegory. 
Teachers  were  highly  prized  who  had  the 
ability  to  force  some  new  and  pertinent  appli- 
cation to  a  case  in  hand  from  Moses  or  Isaiah. 

One  can  but  admire  the  enthusiasm  and 
strength  of  Christian  conviction  which  enabled 
these  early  servants  of  Jesus  to  find  their  truth 
in  the  most  unlikely  places,  and  to  wring  from 
the  stubbornest  language  testimony  to  the  life 
which  was  their  joy  and  strength.  A  new  and 
mighty  power  had  reached  into  their  lives,  and 
they  were  so  transformed  and  uplifted  by  it, 
that  the  dullest  page  put  into  their  hands  was 
suffused  with  the  truth  and  the  glory  their  souls 
had  caught  from  Jesus  Christ. 

There  were  many,  however,  who  could  not 
follow  this  method  of  scriptural  interpretation. 
Marcion  was  one  of  these,  and  it  was  because 


AND   THE   OLD   TESTAMENT  31 

he  could  not  allegorize  the  Old  Testament  that 
he  determined  to  discard  it.  His  followers 
were  numerous,  a  large  company  of  earnest 
folk  to  whom  the  Hebrew  Scriptures,  as  alle- 
gorized by  the  Church,  were  a  stumbling-block. 
The  Manichaeans  won  St.  Augustine,  in  part 
at  least,  by  asking  him  hard  questions  from 
the  Old  Testament.  ''Is  God  bounded  by  a 
bodily  shape,  and  has  He  hair  and  nails? 
Are  they  to  be  esteemed  righteous,  who  had 
many  wives  at  once,  and  did  kill  men,  and 
sacrificed  living  creatures?"^  After  being 
stirred  to  "an  incredibly  burning  desire  for  an 
immortality  of  wisdom"  by  perusal  of  Cicero's 
"Hortensius,"  the  Scriptures  appeared  to  him 
"unworthy  to  be  compared  with  the  stateliness 
of  Tully,"  since  his  "sharp  wit  could  not  pierce 
to  the  interior  thereof,"  ^  i.e.  could  not  discern 
the  figurative  sense.  Augustine  was  per- 
suaded later  of  the  truth  of  the  allegorical 
method  of  interpretation  and  was  thereby  recon- 
ciled to  Moses  and  the  Prophets ;    but  no  man 

*  "Confessions,"  Bk.  Ill,  12. 
2  Ibid.,  Bk.  Ill,  7,  9. 


32  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

knows  how  many  were  not  so  persuaded,  who 
refused  to  let  their  imaginations  run  wild  in  the 
fantasies  of  allegory,  and  who  were  therefore 
lost  to  the  Church  through  the  Old  Testament. 
Almost  as  serious,  however,  were  the  conse- 
quences to  those  who  adopted  the  allegorical 
method  of  interpretation  and  were  loyal  to  the 
Church.  Their  imaginations  were  encouraged 
to  all  manner  of  eccentricities,  and  they  cor- 
rupted their  minds  by  learning  to  extract  petty 
pious  lessons  from  the  six  wings  of  the  sera- 
phim and  the  frogs  that  fouled  the  waters  of 
Egypt.  The  zeal  of  the  prophets  was  largely 
lost  upon  them,  for  they  were  persuaded,  in  the 
words  of  Origen,  "that  those  prophecies  which 
were  delivered  either  concerning  Egypt  and  the 
Egyptians,  or  Babylonia  and  the  Babylonians, 
and  Sidon  and  the  Sidonians,  are  not  to  be 
understood  as  spoken  of  that  Egypt  which  is 
situated  on  the  earth,  or  of  the  earthly  Babylon, 
Tyre,  or  Sidon."  ^  It  matters  little  to  the 
present  purpose  how  they  understood  the 
words  of  Jeremiah  and  Ezekiel;   the  essential 

1  "De  Principiis,"  IV,  i,  22. 


AND   THE   OLD   TESTAMENT  33 

fact  is  that  the  great  acts  of  God  in  the  days  of 
their  fathers,  and  the  exalted  and  heroic  truth 
of  mighty  men  who  threw  all  their  soul  into  the 
terrible  battles  of  their  time,  were  utterly  un- 
noticed, and  the  prophets'  burning  words  dis- 
solved into  patterns  and  shadows.  They  lost 
Isaiah  for  the  sake  of  a  flimsy  argument  for  the 
Trinity. 

They  lost  also  the  ethical  force  of  many  com- 
mandments and  the  spiritual  impetus  from 
many  of  the  sublimest  passages  of  the  New 
Testament  as  well  as  of  the  Old.  Whatever 
was  not  found  true  or  useful  in  its  natural  sense 
in  either  Old  or  New  was  effeminated  into  a 
spiritual  sense.  "Salute  no  man  by  the  way," 
said  Jesus.  "There  are  simple  individuals," 
exclaims  Origen,  "who  think  that  our  Saviour 
gave  this  command  to  his  apostles!"^  The 
learned  father  continues  that  the  Master  can- 
not have  intended  the  order  to  have  neither 
two  coats  nor  shoes,  since  there  are  countries 
of  rigorous  winter,  where  such  a  commandment 
would  be  cruel :  and  likewise  he  explains  away 

1  "De  Principiis,"  IV,  i,  18. 


34  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

all  force  from  the  precept  to  turn  the  left  cheek 
also  by  the  observation  that  one  is  naturally 
struck  on  the  left  cheek  first,  since  the  other 
fellow  is  pretty  apt  to  be  right-handed.  As  to 
offence  through  the  right  eye,  he  declares  it 
impossible  that,  when  there  are  two  eyes  that 
see,  the  responsibility  for  the  offence  should  be 
transferred  to  one  eye,  and  that  the  right  one. 
Thus  the  dangerous  practice  of  deriving  from 
texts  that  which  may  edify,  despite  their  real 
meaning,  which  arose  from  the  resolution  to 
make  the  Old  Testament  a  Christian  book, 
resulted  in  blindness  to  large  elements  of  the 
truth  and  spirit  of  Jesus  Christ. 

It  is  a  pitiable  thing  when  one  is  trivial  in 
the  presence  of  the  sublime.  To  pass  through 
halls  and  chambers  eloquent  of  the  deeds  of 
mighty  dead,  and  to  give  one's  energy  to  work- 
ing out  a  puzzle  in  a  decoration  or  in  the  pattern 
of  a  bit  of  embroidery,  is  a  sad  lapse  from  man- 
hood. It  was  a  tragedy  when  the  early  Church 
forsook  the  strictly  literal  interpretation  of  the 
records  of  the  heroes  of  faith,  and  for  the  plain, 
historical  picture  of  their  lives  and  testimonies 


AND   THE   OLD  TESTAMENT  35 

exchanged  a  puzzle  of  miraculous  prediction 
and  of  history  before  the  time.  Such  a  step 
may  have  been  necessary  to  the  adoption  of  the 
Old  Testament  by  the  Church;  it  may  have 
been  good  defensive  tactics  at  the  moment. 
But  in  this  generation  there  is  no  reason 
why  the  errors  involved  in  the  procedure 
should  not  be  exposed,  and  repented  of  and 
forsaken  by  all  who  have  light  to  see  them. 
To  this  day  minds  naturally  alert  and  pene- 
trating are  befogged  and  confused  by  their  en- 
deavors to  read  the  whole  New  Testament  into 
the  Old,  and  then  out  of  it.  Men's  reasoning 
faculties  are  perverted  by  the  imagination 
that  the  grace  which  God  created  new  and  glo- 
rious in  the  soul  of  Jesus  Christ,  that  the  truth 
which  the  Nazarene  struggled  for  with  demons, 
and  which  he  drew  in  from  the  nestling  love 
of  little  babes,  —  that  this  grace  which  was 
vitally  achieved  by  the  Son  of  God  can  be 
worked  out  through  the  fringes  and  colors  of 
the  curtains,  and  the  silver  and  gold  of  the  orna- 
ments, of  a  Hebrew  priest's  prescription  for  a 
shrine. 


36  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

For  nearly  twenty  centuries  the  Church  has 
been  trying  to  make  a  book  mean  what  it  does 
not  mean,  and  to  turn  the  law  which  was  a 
schoolmaster  to  lead  to  Christ  into  the  very 
portrait  of  his  glory.  The  damage  from  the 
endeavor  has  been  great.  When  one  considers 
how  much  has  been  wrought  in  the  name  of 
the  Nazarene  which  is  utterly  foreign  to  his 
spirit,  —  the  persecutions,  the  liturgies,  the 
relics,  the  images,  the  philosophies,  —  who 
shall  say  what  measure  of  the  responsibility 
lies  at  the  door  of  the  allegorical  method  of  the 
interpretation  of  Scripture  which  the  adoption 
of  the  Old  Testament  introduced  into  the  Chris- 
tian Church  ? 

If  Christian  disciples  had  always  made  it  their 
practice  to  turn  first  to  Jesus'  own  words,  and 
to  those  passages  of  the  Epistles  which  reflect 
his  spirit  most  accurately,  and  had  interpreted 
remaining  Scriptures  by  the  light  thus  gained, 
the  injury  would  have  been  much  less  than  has 
actually  been  the  case.  But  the  allegorical 
method  made  possible  the  tenet  that  both  Old 
and  New,  and  all  portions  of  both,  were  on  the 


AND   THE   OLD   TESTAMENT  37 

same  level  of  authority.  The  result  has  been 
that  much  in  the  Old  which  is  decidedly  on  a 
lower  plane  than  the  parables  and  the  Logia 
of  Jesus  has  been  received  as  Christian  teach- 
ing, and  carried  out  in  life  as  though  it  were  the 
good  and  acceptable  and  perfect  will  of  God. 
Christianity  has  suffered  ethically  all  through 
its  history,  and  receives  moral  injury  to-day, 
from  the  inclusion  of  the  Old  Testament  in  its 
rule  of  faith.  Many  the  men  whose  hearts 
have  been  won  by  Christ  Jesus,  whose  sincere 
desire  has  been  to  follow  his  more  perfect  way, 
who  have  descended  to  acts  unworthy  of  their 
faith,  not  in  yielding  to  the  lusts  of  the  flesh, 
but  in  loyalty  to  what  they  had  received  from 
the  Old  Testament,  and  the  idea  that  it  was 
God's  final  teaching.  Some  of  the  noblest 
men  God  ever  made  have  been  less  than  their 
best  because  they  made  Moses  the  equal  of 
Christ,  and  Abraham  the  equal  of  Paul. 

The  most  serious  blot  on  the  character  of 
Martin  Luther,  perhaps  the  largest  Christian 
since  Paul,  was  his  consent  to  the  bigamy  of 
Philip,  the  Landgrave  of  Hesse.     Philip  the 


38  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

Magnanimous,  a  man  of  courage  and  power, 
invaluable  to  the  Reformation  in  matters  of 
State,  had  contracted  in  early  life  a  marriage 
which  proved  unhappy.  After  sixteen  years 
of  distress,  in  which,  notwithstanding,  his 
wife  bore  him  seven  children,  he  resolved  to 
take  to  himself  another  consort.  As  a  meas- 
ure of  defence  against  popular  disapproval 
he  sought  from  Luther  a  public  statement 
that  his  act  was  justifiable,  or,  in  case  that  were 
impossible,  a  personal  letter,  as  of  a  father  con- 
fessor, which  might  be  used  in  case  the  storm 
of  popular  anger  rose  too  high.  Luther  had 
no  joy  over  the  matter;  the  whole  affair  was 
distasteful  to  him.  Nevertheless  he  put  his 
name  to  the  letter,  and  Melancthon  signed  it 
also ;  and  their  action  to  this  day  furnishes  oc- 
casion for  taunt  and  sneer.  But  note  the  rea- 
soning by  which  the  fatal  blunder  was  made. 
The  patriarchs,  said  Luther,  as  indeed  Philip 
reminded    him,^  were   bigamists.     They   took 

^Rockwell,  "Die  Doppelehe  des  Landgrafen  Philipp 
von  Hessen,"  p.  24.  Other  theologians  less  honorable  than 
Luther  advised  Philip  to  deny  his  second  marriage  alto- 


AND  THE   OLD  TESTAMENT  39 

their  plural  wives,  according  to  the  record,  with 
the  consent  of  God.  Nowhere  in  the  Bible  is 
there  disapproval  of  their  conduct,  nor  annul- 
ment of  the  apparent  precedent  that  in  special 
cases  a  man  useful  to  God  may  have  more  than 
one  wife.  So  with  his  sound  heart  protesting, 
but  held  to  the  deed  by  a  false  view  of  Old 
Testament  Scripture,  he  put  the  name  of  a 
Christian  prophet  to  consent  to  a  prince's  lust. 
A  man  must  of  course  be  judged  by  the  stand- 
ards of  his  time,  and  it  is  doubtless  true  that  the 
question  in  the  mind  both  of  Philip  and  Luther 
was  not  between  bigamy  and  monogamy,  but 
between  bigamy  and  something  very  much 
worse.  A  second  lawful  wife  in  an  age  when 
loathsome  disease  ran  like  an  epidemic  among 
the  princes  of  the  Church  ^  is  comparatively 
venial.  But  despite  all  extenuation,  the  blot 
remains,  a  witness  to  the  moral  injury  received 
by  a  noble  soul  through  a  mistaken  notion  of 
the  authority  of  the  Old  Testament. 

gether  in  public,  on  the  ground  that  Abraham  had  denied 
his  wife  before  Pharaoh.     Ibid.,  p.  74. 

^  Bloch,  "DerUrsprung  der  Syphilis,"  p.  168.     Quoted 
by  Rockwell,  p.  3. 


40  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

All  that  we  might  wish  otherwise  in  the  char- 
acter of  Oliver  Cromwell  is  described  and  de- 
fended, in  the  Protector's  own  words,  by  texts 
from  the  Hebrew  Scriptures.  With  the  curses 
of  the  imprecatory  Psalms  upon  his  lips  he 
sought  to  do  his  duty  as  a  Christian  soldier, 
and  in  the  name  of  him  who  did  not  strive,  nor 
cry,  nor  cause  his  voice  to  be  heard  in  the  streets, 
he  pursued  his  enemies  relentlessly,  giving  no 
quarter,  sparing  neither  soldier,  priest,  nor  citi- 
zen. When  the  Scottish  army  of  twenty- 
three  thousand  was  at  last  defeated,  and  the 
''chase  and  execution"  had  lasted  for  eight 
miles  until  scarcely  a  fragment  remained,  he 
declared,  "This  is  the  Lord's  doing :  it  is  mar- 
vellous in  our  eyes."  ^  No  doubt  he  was  a  hero, 
and  served  nobly  the  cause  of  liberty,  but  there 
must  be  remembered  also  the  massacres  of 
Drogheda  and  Wexford,  and  the  bigotry  of 
Ireland,  and  the  religious  partisanship  of  Eng- 
land, which  to  this  day  feed  and  fatten  on  his 
name.  In  the  guide-books  there  is  scarcely 
a   cathedral  or   parish  church  in  England  in 

^  Prothero,  "The  Psalms  in  Human  Life,"  p.  256. 


AND   THE   OLD    TESTAMENT  41 

which  Cromwell  did  not  stable  his  horses  and 
defile  the  sanctuary,  a  warning  to  all  saints  that 
if  they  would  not  have  their  piety  unjustly  cele- 
brated, they  must  not  fashion  it  too  exclu- 
sively upon  the  Old  Testament. 

It  may  be  questioned  whether  the  iron  in  the 
Puritan  had  a  Hebrew  source.  It  would  seem 
that  their  strength  lay  rather  in  their  conviction 
of  immutable  redemption  through  Christ  their 
Saviour.  But  the  failings  of  the  Puritan  were 
Jewish  limitations  imposed  upon  their  con- 
sciences by  imperfect  views  of  Scripture.  The 
gallows  in  Salem,  for  which  we  still  hang  our 
heads  in  shame,  was  erected  by  a  text  from 
Exodus  —  "Thou  shalt  not  suffer  a  witch  to 
live." 

What  Christian  king  going  out  to  war,  to 
settle  a  matter  of  right  by  the  murder  of  men, 
has  not  appealed  to  Gideon's  sword  of  the 
Lord  !  What  stronger  nation  crushing  a  weaker 
people  has  not  salved  its  conscience  by  mention 
of  Joshua  and  the  Canaanites !  Black  men 
writhe  under  the  lash  in  Africa  to-day  in  the 
name  of  the  curse  of  Ham !    Women  of  en- 


42  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

lightened  countries  are  forbidden  respite  from 
anaesthetics  in  their  hour  of  agony  because  of 
the  doom  of  Eve.  Parents  excuse  angry  beat- 
ings of  their  children  by  a  text  from  Solomon. 
It  is  not  all  advantage  which  the  world  and 
the  Christian  Church  have  received  from  the 
adoption  of  the  Old  Testament  as  authoritative 
Scripture,  and  it  remains  to  inquire  whether 
we  are  in  position  to-day,  through  better  under- 
standing of  the  Hebrew  writings  and  their  rela- 
tion to  Christian  faith,  to  avoid  the  evils  which 
the  fathers  have  suffered,  while  not  forfeiting 
our  hold  upon  the  good. 

THE  OLD  TESTAMENT  AND  THE  FAITH  OF  TO-DAY 

It  is  impossible  longer  to  regard  the  thirty-nine 
books  from  Genesis  to  Malachi  as  a  harmonious 
revelation  of  religious  truth  and  a  uniform  law 
of  moral  conduct.  In  no  literature  which  the 
world  possesses  is  evidence  of  development  and 
advance  more  clear  and  convincing  than  in  the 
literature  of  the  Hebrews.  The  Old  Testa- 
ment is  a  report  of  progress,  a  faithful  register 


AND  THE   OLD   TESTAMENT  43 

of  the  upward  strivings  of  an  earnest  folk  from 
a  very  crude  faith  and  a  very  rude  ethic  to  views 
concerning  God  and  moral  obligation  which  the 
world  still  reckons  among  its  chiefest  treasures. 
Both  the  crude  beginnings,  the  fierce  struggles 
upward,  and  the  exalted  attainments  are  frankly 
and  honestly  recorded.  They  do  not  follow 
page  after  page;  some  of  the  noblest  concep- 
tions are  to  be  found  in  the  first  chapter,  as  the 
Bible  is  at  present  printed,  and  many  of  the 
latest  sections  represent  the  creed  and  life  of 
narrow  and  petty  days,  far  inferior  to  the  glories 
which  had  preceded  them.  Yet  it  is  not  diffi- 
cult, with  the  means  at  present  at  command, 
to  unravel  the  story,  and  to  trace  the  long,  up- 
ward journey  by  which  a  marvellously  patient 
God  led  His  servants  to  the  best  it  was  in  them 
to  conceive  concerning  the  truths  of  the  spirit. 
It  is  not  correct,  therefore,  to  speak  of  the  Old 
Testament  as  if  it  were  a  unified  system  of 
religious  truth,  or  a  consistent  collection  of 
moral  precepts.  All  manner  of  religious  no- 
tions and  all  grades  of  ethical  teaching  are  in- 
cluded in  its  pages. 


44  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

Once  the  eyes  are  open  to  this  diversity  and 
unevenness  in  the  perception  of  truth  and  right, 
the  power  of  the  Old  Testament  for  evil  is 
undermined.  The  crimes  and  blunders  com- 
mitted by  appeal  to  its  authority  are  no  longer 
justifiable  to  a  Christian  conscience.  Mr. 
Rowland  E.  Prothero  tells  of  a  British  soldier 
called  ironically  ''Quaker  Wallace,"  of  his 
Majesty's  Indian  forces,  who  plunged  into  the 
Secundrabagh  like  one  of  the  Furies,  and  at 
every  shot  from  his  rifle,  and  at  each  thrust 
of  his  bayonet,  repeated  a  line :  — 

"I'll  of  salvation  take  the  cup, 
On  God's  name  will  I  call : 
I'll  pay  my  vows  now  to  the  Lord 
Before  his  people  all."  ^ 

Doubtless  one  should  be  grateful  that  "  Quaker 
Wallace"  was  supported  in  his  duty,  but  sup- 
port in  that  sort  of  duty  is  no  longer  afforded 
by  Scripture,  nor  by  paraphrase  from  Scripture, 
according  to  intelligent  Christian  understand- 
ing. General  sentiment  has  felt  its  way  to  dis- 
criminative use  of  the  Bible,  and  further  grad- 

^  "The  Psalms  in  Human  Life,"  p.  364  f. 


AND    THE   OLD    TESTAMENT  45 

ual  improvement  of  the  same  nature  is  to  be 
confidently  expected. 

When  the  modern  view  of  the  Old  Testament 
as  a  register  of  progress  has  its  full  effect,  much 
in  our  common  morals  that  is  below  the  best 
enlightenment,  and  still  more  in  the  prevailing 
religious  conceptions,  will  find  its  correction. 
Criticism  bears  no  sword  which  can  wreak 
the  slightest  injury  upon  any  truth  which  is 
really  true,  nor  diminish  aught  the  force  of  any 
law  or  precept  which  finds  the  conscience  of  its 
own  might.  But  criticism  is  full  of  destructive 
power  against  the  opinions  of  those  who  would 
oppress  their  brothers  in  the  name  of  God, 
who  would  pray  selfishly,  who  would  worship 
or  keep  the  Sabbath  for  their  own  mean  advan- 
tage, or  who  think  to  confine  the  grace  of  the 
Almighty  in  the  puny  channels  of  their  own  creed 
or  sect.  Support  of  evils  of  which  humanity 
would  well  be  free  is  removed  by  critical  and 
historical  study  of  the  ancient  records,  and  thus 
the  injuries  which  have  been  received  hitherto 
through  improper  methods  of  interpretation 
will  be  avoided  in  the  future  in  proportion  as 


46  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

the  modern  view  of  the  Old  Testament  pre- 
vails. 

On  the  other  hand,  whatever  of  good  the 
fathers  have  gathered  from  the  law  and  the 
prophets  is  as  open  to  us  as  it  was  to  them. 
"Thou  shalt  not  steal"  is  not  less  authoritative 
because  Moses  did  not  write  it.  "The  Lord  is 
my  shepherd"  is  not  less  persuasive  of  gentle 
comfort  for  that  David's  piety  was  of  a  much 
ruder  sort.  Both  the  commandments  and  the 
consolations  have  a  force  of  their  own,  inde- 
pendent of  all  questions  of  authorship  and  time 
of  composition.  Their  compelling  power  is 
due  to  the  eternal  truth  and  right  embodied  in 
them,  and  as  long  as  men  live  who  need  them, 
they  will  speak  with  authority. 

But  it  is  not  sufficient  to  say  that  in  certain  of 
its  truths  and  precepts  the  Old  Testament  is  as 
useful  to-day  as  it  was  formerly,  for  the  facts 
are  that  the  book  as  a  whole  is  more  useful, 
that  the  men  of  to-day  are  in  better  position  to 
receive  high  spiritual  benefit  from  it  than  the 
members  of  any  former  generation.  Through 
our  modern  view  of  the  book  we  may  attain 


AND   THE   OLD   TESTAMENT  47 

sympathetic  understanding  of  some  of  the 
world's  noblest  spiritual  achievements  to  a 
degree  impossible  to  them  of  old  time.  Being 
a  register  of  religious  progress,  the  Old  Testa- 
ment allows  us  to  stand  by  while  the  Almighty 
forges  the  truth  by  which  humanity  has  been 
uplifted.  We  see  the  forces  He  brings  on  the 
field,  hear  their  awful  crash,  and  watch  some 
hero  as  he  takes  the  stand  which  men  will 
ever  look  back  upon  as  one  of  the  permanent 
victories  of  the  spirit.  It  were  one  thing  to 
receive  a  leaf  of  some  heavenly  Bible,  fluttering 
from  the  skies :  but  it  is  far  grander  to  watch  a 
man,  even  to  step  as  a  brother  at  his  side,  while 
he  works  out  on  this  confused  and  stubborn 
earth  the  truth  writ  into  this  human  Bible, 
which  for  its  humanity  is  the  more  precious 
word  of  God.  That  we  may  do  in  Elijah,  who 
selected  the  name  of  God  for  the  forward  push- 
ing nations  of  the  world ;  in  Amos,^  who  placed 
righteousness  on  the  throne  of  the  universe, 
there  to  abide  as  long  as  men  think  and  worship ; 
in  Jeremiah,  whose  accents,  whose  very  visage, 

1  Cf .  Chapter  IV. 


48  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

one  discerns  in  the  Nazarene,  who  after  his 
prototype  was  a  man  of  sorrows  acquainted 
with  grief.  We  have  lost  the  arsenal  of  texts, 
each  of  the  caliber  of  every  other,  and  with  it 
liability  to  many  errors  and  sins ;  we  have  gained 
a  truthful  portrait  of  men  in  whose  lives  the 
Almighty  has  fought  His  battles  for  the  highest 
spiritual  truths  yet  discovered. 

In  gaining  these  men  we  have  found  also  the 
way  to  faith  in  these  modern  times.  Faith  is 
not  born  of  argument  and  demonstration,  but 
of  life,  made  worthy  by  faith,  that  lifts  other  life 
to  its  level.  Men  produce  other  men;  syllo- 
gisms and  arguments  are  powerless  to  produce 
them.  Hence  the  great  blessing  of  the  newer 
view  of  the  Hebrew  Scriptures,  which  makes 
its  men  so  real.  Elijah  is  no  longer  a  Chris- 
tian who  happened  to  live  in  the  time  of  Ahab, 
but  the  first  of  the  prophets,  his  creed  consist- 
ing of  one  article,  "The  Lord  !  He  is  God !'' 
but  that  article  believed  with  all  his  soul ;  and 
as  we  watch  him  in  his  fight,  and  pushing  aside 
the  tradition  to  get  at  the  plain  truth,  come  into 
contact  with  the  man  of  him,  the  faith  of  his 


AND   THE   OLD   TESTAMENT  49 

fearless  manhood  takes  possession  also  of  us. 
The  Old  Testament  throughout  is  a  book  of 
mighty  men,  mighty  because  of  their  belief, 
and  the  possibility  and  privilege  of  sympathetic 
knowledge  of  them,  their  problems  and  their 
victories,  is  full  of  promise  of  good  for  the  moral 
and  religious  life  of  the  generations  yet  to  be. 

The  Old  Testament  is  no  longer  our  master. 
One  is  our  Master,  even  Christ.  The  Jewish 
portion  of  the  Bible  no  longer  holds  over  us 
the  power  to  make  us  less  than  our  best,  and  to 
compel  us  to  believe  less  than  our  highest  truth. 
The  religion  of  faith  and  freedom  for  which 
Jesus  gave  his  life  is  no  longer  hampered  by 
the  legalism  and  the  petty  ritualistic  precepts 
of  Jewish  Scriptures.  The  Galilean  liberty 
of  the  children  of  God  stands  out  at  last  un- 
trammelled of  the  encumbrances  from  which 
for  many  centuries  it  could  not  deliver  itself. 
Prayers  that  were  not  perfect,  which  could 
not  be  prayed  to  the  equal  Father  of  all  men, 
are  seen  to  have  been  unworthy,  although  they 
may  have  served  as  stepping-stones  to  the 
prayer.    Our   Father.       Commandments   that 


50  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

were  cruel,  that  were  based  on  inadequate 
knowledge,  we  cannot  revere  as  the  present  will 
of  God.  The  miracles  of  the  Hebrew  Scrip- 
tures, the  stumbling-block  of  countless  genera- 
tions, take  their  place  as  necessary  concomitants 
of  every  collection  of  traditions  of  the  old-time 
world.  But  new  miracles  rise  from  their  pages. 
They  are  the  men,  who  speak  for  God  in  accents 
yet  vital  and  clear.  God  was  in  those  men,  and 
the  book  which  enshrines  their  lives,  no  longer 
a  weight  upon  our  morals  or  our  piety,  is  our 
servant,  to  teach  us  how  God's  truth  came  to  be, 
and  it  is  the  servant  also  of  Jesus  Christ,  not 
an  obstacle  in  the  way  to  him,  revealing  the  steps 
by  which  we  may  approach  him  in  whom  alone 
dwelleth  the  fulness  of  the  Godhead  bodily. 


CHAPTER   II 

THE     DIFFICULTY     OF     UNDERSTANDING 
THE   OLD   TESTAMENT 

An  unconyentional  brother  once  enlivened 
a  church  prayer-meeting  with  the  truthful  ob- 
servation that  if  an  ordinary  Christian  found 
himself  in  a  comfortable  Pullman  stalled  on  a 
Western  prairie,  with  reading  facilities  limited 
to  a  last  year's  almanac,  a  Hoboken  directory, 
and  a  copy  of  the  Bible,  he  would  first  exhaust 
the  almanac,  next  extract  all  possible  interest 
from  the  directory,  and  lastly,  if  the  delay  were 
long  enough,  turn  to  the  Bible.  It  is  on  record 
that  a  certain  African  had  persistence  enough  to 
read  the  Scriptures  in  a  jolting  chariot  on  the 
wretched  highway  from  Jerusalem  to  Gaza, 
but  from  the  attention  the  matter  attracted  it 
is  evident  that  such  conduct  was  as  unusual  in 
antiquity  as  manifestation  of  like  zeal  would  be 
to-day.  The  Ethiopian,  however,  found  the 
book  somewhat  hard  to  understand,  and  in 
51 


52  THE  CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

that  respect  his  experience  is  duplicated  all  too 
often  in  our  own  times.  With  something  like 
300,000  sermons  on  biblical  texts  preached  every 
week  in  the  churches  of  the  United  States, 
with  over  a  million  people  teaching  Sunday- 
school  classes,  with  books  and  pamphlets  by 
the  thousand  on  all  phases  of  Bible  study,  it 
remains  a  fact  that  only  the  few  have  more 
than  the  most  general  knowledge  of  the  Bible, 
while  the  great  majority  even  of  well-informed 
people  feel  that  their  knowledge  of  Scripture 
is  sadly  deficient.  No  subject  is  taught  so 
much  and  understood  so  little.  If  a  tithe  of 
the  pains  which  is  now  expended  in  endeavors 
to  imbue  American  youth  with  a  knowledge  of 
Scripture  were  taken  to  obsess  their  minds  with 
the  dramas  of  Shakespeare,  ignorance  of  the 
trap  in  which  Shylock  was  caught  would  be 
hard  to  find.  Yet  who  does  not  know  that 
references  to  like  prominent  events  in  biblical 
story  are  met  with  looks  of  questioning  wonder 
even  on  the  faces  of  educated  persons? 

All    interesting    and    intelligible   books    are 
perused    to-day    with    great    avidity.     If    the 


OLD   TESTAMENT   DIFFICULTIES         53 

Bible  is  not  read,  and  if  large  numbers  are  igno- 
rant concerning  it,  the  reason  must  be  that  it 
is  not  found  interesting,  and  it  is  safe  to  add 
that  the  reason  the  book  does  not  incite  interest 
is  because  it  is  not  understood.  I  received  a 
confession  the  other  day,  deponent  witnessing 
about  as  follows:  "I  made  up  my  mind  I  was 
neglecting  the  study  of  the  Bible,  and  I  re- 
solved to  study  it  seriously ;  I  happened  to  open 
up  the  book  to  Jeremiah,  and  feeling  that  there 
was  unexplored  territory,  which  might  offer 
something  new  and  agreeable,  I  began  to  read ; 
but  I  was  disappointed  greatly;  I  could  not 
see  what  it  was  all  about,  and  I  soon  gave  up 
the  effort." 

This  confession  declares  the  situation  of 
many  persons,  especially  in  relation  to  the 
Old  Testament.  They  do  not  read  because 
they  are  not  interested,  and  they  are  not  inter- 
ested because  they  do  not  understand. 

Now  why  should  it  be  difficult  for  any  person 
of  ordinary  intelligence  to  understand  the  Old 
Testament?  Certainly  not  for  the  same  rea- 
son that  it  is  hard  to  follow  Kant's  ''Critique 


54  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

of  the  Pure  Reason"  or  Mr.  Balfour's  "Founda- 
tions of  Belief."  The  Old  Testament  is  not 
philosophical;  its  thought  is  not  abstruse,  its 
conceptions  are  not  abstract,  its  style  is  not  in- 
volved. There  is  not  a  sentence  in  Jeremiah 
which  is  beyond  the  grasp  of  an  ordinary  mind 
because  of  the  depth  or  difficulty  of  the  idea 
which  it  contains.  If  any  verse  of  the  book 
is  unintelligible,  it  is  not  because  what  the 
prophet  would  say  is  beyond  ordinary  compre- 
hension, but  because  the  reader  does  not  com- 
prehend what  the  prophet  is  trying  to  say. 

For  example,  one  reads  that  Jeremiah  said: 
"I  see  a  boiling  caldron,  and  the  face  thereof 
is  from  the  north."  ^  Every  one  can  picture  to 
himself  a  seething  pot  with  spout  pointing  away 
from  the  north,  and  the  image  is  readily  called 
forth  by  the  prophet's  language ;  but  what  he 
means  by  it  is  not  clear,  and  is  not  made  clear 
by  his  explanation,  "out  of  the  north  shall 
evil  break  forth  upon  all  the  inhabitants  of 
the  land."  Why  this  evil?  Why  from  the 
north?      Why  such  uncanny  imagery?    It  is 

^  Jeremiah  i^^^- 


OLD   TESTAMENT  DIFFICULTIES         55 

not  very  easy  even  for  the  studious  reader  to 
find  an  answer.  Yet  until  one  enters  by  sym- 
pathy into  the  life  of  Jeremiah's  day,  and  feels 
with  him  the  terrible  army  of  the  Babylonians 
and  their  resistless  march  southward  toward 
Jerusalem,  it  is  as  idle  to  think  to  understand 
his  words  as  it  would  be  to  endeavor  to  extract 
meaning  from  Lincoln's  second  inaugural  if 
one  did  not  know  that  America  was  ever  en- 
gaged in  a  civil  war. 

Doubtless  the  dedicatory  address  at  Gettys- 
burg, to  one  as  far  away  from  the  events  of 
1861-1865  as  the  men  of  to-day  are  removed 
from  the  equally  portentous  times  of  Jeremiah, 
would  be  as  sounding  brass  or  a  tinkling  cym- 
bal. But  given  like  knowledge  of  the  Hebrew 
patriot,  and  his  words  will  be  not  less  eloquent, 
not  less  pathetic,  not  less  inspired,  than  the 
words  of  the  modern  martyr.  Indeed  when  you 
know  them,  there  is  a  strange  likeness  between 
these  two  —  lonely  men,  pathetic  men,  sensitive 
men  appointed  unto  marked  publicity,  tender- 
hearted men  obligated  to  awful  deeds. 

The  obscurity  of    Jeremiah,  owing   to  the 


56  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

difficulty  of  arriving  at  a  clear  understanding  of 
the  situation  to  which  he  addressed  himself, 
is  a  fair  example  of  the  obstacles  one  meets 
on  almost  every  page  of  the  Old  Testament. 
There  are  gems  of  utterance,  like  the  Gettys- 
burg address,  but  no  explanation  of  the  occa- 
sion on  which  they  were  delivered.  There  are 
orations  on  public  policy,  whose  elevation  one 
cannot  mistake,  and  from  whose  moral  fervor 
the  soul  catches  fire,  yet  their  full  force  is  missed 
because  sometimes  their  parts  are  disconnected, 
while  irrelevant  and  neutralizing  sections  are 
thrown  in,  and  the  orderly  thought  of  the  whole 
and  the  goal  the  speaker  had  in  mind  are  not 
brought  into  the  clear.  The  mighty  men  of  the 
Old  Testament  were  prophets,  and  they  were 
the  makers  of  Israel's  religion ;  but  their  works 
have  come  down  to  us  in  such  fragmentary 
manner,  with  such  frequent  breaches  of  chrono- 
logical sequence,  that  the  ordinary  reader  is 
bewildered  and  confused,  and  no  clear  concep- 
tion of  the  prophet's  work  results.  The  conse- 
quence is  that  the  only  popular  use  of  the  most 
essential  books  of  the  Old  Testament  is  to 


OLD   TESTAMENT   DIFFICULTIES        57 

furnish  a  few  texts  by  which  it  is  thought  to 
establish  the  fulfilment  of  prediction,  an  argu- 
ment for  faith  which  is  weak  in  itself,  and  be- 
comes weaker  the  more  one  studies  it,  and  which 
has  the  disastrous  consequence  of  blinding  its 
devotees  to  the  true  historical  meaning  of  the 
texts  which  it  thus  perverts. 

If  the  statement  that  the  prophetical  writ- 
ings are  fragmentary,  interpolated,  and  without 
chronological  sequence  smacks  too  much  of 
subjective  criticism,  the  difficulty  of  deriving 
from  them  any  idea  of  the  orderly  growth  of 
Israel's  piety  may  be  substantiated  as  forcibly 
from  the  order  in  which  book  follows  book. 
Taking  the  minor  prophets,  one  goes  from 
Hosea,  a  teacher  in  the  great  days  of  Jeroboam 
II  of  Israel  to  Joel,  who  was  one  of  the  last  of 
the  prophets,  and  who  quotes  from  many  of 
them;  thence  back  to  Amos,  who  was  the  first 
of  all,  preceding  even  Isaiah;  thence  to  Oba- 
diah,  who  had  somewhat  to  say  concerning 
Edom  in  the  days  of  the  exile ;  thence  to  Jonah, 
who  was  not  a  prophet  at  all,  but  a  literary 
artist  of  the  first  magnitude  and  a  teacher  of 


58  THE  CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

toleration  and  of  the  equal  Father  of  all  men  in 
the  late  times  of  Israel's  bigotry;  thence  to 
Micah,  a  younger  contemporary  of  Isaiah :  and 
thus  from  Isaiah  to  Malachi  the  reader  is 
snatched  hither  and  yon,  dragged  forward  and 
backward  over  centuries,  and  confronted  with 
situations  the  most  diverse.  It  is  instructive  to 
note  the  dates  of  the  several  prophets,  major 
and  minor,  as  their  books  stand  in  the  Bible, 
taking  in  each  case  the  earliest  probable  date 
of  the  predominant  portion  of  the  prophecy. 
Beginning  with  Isaiah,  the  years  before  Christ 
are  as  follows:  740,  626,  592,  168,  745,  400, 
760,  450,  450,  700,  650,  600,  630,  520,  520,  540. 
It  is  patent  that  from  a  book  thus  put  together 
it  is  impossible  for  the  general  reader  to  derive 
anything  like  a  consistent  picture  of  the  relation 
of  mind  to  mind  and  of  the  development  of  re- 
ligious truth  and  practice. 

The  suggestion  is  near  at  hand  that,  since 
many  of  the  prophetical  writings  are  equipped 
with  a  brief  introduction  relating  them  to  times 
of  particular  kings,  one  has  but  to  turn  to 
the  historical  books  and  secure  from  thence  the 


OLD   TESTAMENT   DIFFICULTIES         59 

necessary  background  for  the  knowledge  of  the 
prophets.  It  might  seem  providential  that 
the  Old  Testament  offers  both  the  original 
documents  of  its  growing  truth  in  the  form  of 
prophetic  discourses,  and  also  historical  sum- 
maries of  the  problems  and  events  of  each  corre- 
sponding period.  One  has  not  to  proceed  far 
on  this  theory  before  discovering  that  the  books 
of  Kings  and  Chronicles  are  utterly  disappoint- 
ing if  one  seeks  to  gain  from  them  any  real 
knowledge  of  the  situations  to  which  the  makers 
of  Israel's  faith  applied  themselves.  To  be 
sure,  the  historians  have  preserved  a  large 
number  of  important  facts,  without  which  our 
knowledge  would  be  far  smaller  than  it  is ;  but 
as  guide-posts  on  the  way  to  correct  apprecia- 
tion of  the  means  and  the  steps  by  which  Israel 
travelled  her  long  road  upward  toward  her 
worthiest  faith,  these  books  of  history  are  alto- 
gether misleading.  It  is  not  too  much  to  say 
that  Israel's  historians  have  prevented  true 
understanding  of  their  nation's  greatness  in  the 
case  of  countless  thousands.  With  their  monot- 
onous comment  on  the  ''sin  of  Jeroboam,  the 


60  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

son  of  Nebat,  wherewith  he  made  Israel  to 
sin,''  they  have  estimated  each  generation  for 
over  two  hundred  years  according  to  its  devo- 
tion to  one  particular  sanctuary,  condemning 
each  king  who  did  not  worship  at  the  prescribed 
altar  and  according  to  the  proper  ritual.  Such 
a  history  no  more  gives  a  faithful  account  of  the 
real  condition  of  things  in  Israel  than  would  a 
similar  account  of  the  history  of  New  York 
City  since  the  days  of  Peter  Stuyvesant,  which 
made  chiefly  prominent  the  sort  of  ritual  prac- 
tised in  Trinity  Church,  and  the  measure  of  ad- 
herence to  it  on  the  part  of  the  various  mayors. 
The  hopelessness  of  deriving  a  sufficient  con- 
ception of  the  character  of  Israel's  kings,  the 
true  nature  of  their  piety,  and  the  progress  of 
their  people  toward  nobler  life  and  worthier 
ideas  of  God,  from  a  history  of  this  character, 
must  be  evident  to  all. 

The  Old  Testament  as  it  stands  to-day  is 
dominated  by  the  priestly  notions  which  pre- 
vailed in  the  time  of  Israel's  decay,  two  cen- 
turies after  the  ages  of  its  strongest  life  and  its 
clearest  vision  of  the  things  of  God.    In  the 


OLD   TESTAMENT  DIFFICULTIES        6 1 

year  458  B.C.  Ezra  the  scribe  came  from 
Babylonia  to  Palestine,  and  brought  with  him 
the  law  of  God.  A  reformation  was  enacted 
in  Jerusalem,  in  accordance  with  its  terms, 
and  from  the  character  of  this  reformation  and 
the  dependence  of  the  law  upon  Ezekiel,  it 
can  be  shown  that  the  code  for  which  Ezra 
the  scribe  was  so  zealous  had  been  composed 
not  long  before  in  Babylon.  This  is  the  code 
which  shows  least  the  influence  of  the  prophets, 
which  is  monotonously  tiresome  in  ritualistic 
prescriptions,  which  makes  religion  a  matter 
of  altar  measurements  and  curtain  hangings, 
and  which  teaches  by  certain  implication  that 
to  sacrifice  is  better  than  to  obey,  and  that  the 
sacrifices  of  God  are  not  a  broken  and  a  con- 
trite heart,  but  the  blood  of  bulls  and  of  goats. 
Leviticus  is  simply  the  priestcraft  against  which 
Amos  and  Isaiah  hurled  invective,  transformed 
into  law,  and  entitled  with  the  name  of  Moses. 
Yet  it  is  precisely  this  legal  and  priestly 
portion  of  the  Old  Testament  which  constitutes 
its  framework,  which  has  fixed  its  chronology, 
which  has  thrust  its  general  scheme  of  the  his- 


62  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

tory  of  the  Hebrews  and  the  origin  and  growth 
of  their  religion  into  general  acceptance  and 
belief.  The  popular  notion  of  the  Old  Testa- 
ment is  the  priestly  notion,  which  Amos  would 
have  resisted  as  strenuously  as  he  opposed 
Amaziah,  the  priest  of  Bethel,  and  which  is  as 
far  below  the  noblest  piety  of  Israel  as  2  Peter 
is  below  the  Gospel  of  St.  John.  It  is  due  to 
the  code  which  Ezra  brought  from  Babylon 
that  we  think  of  Israel  in  the  desert  as  a  great 
Church  on  a  pilgrimage,  with  a  shrine  outrival- 
ing in  splendor  the  tomb  of  a  mediaeval  saint, 
and  a  system  of  worship  more  complex  and 
costly  than  the  most  elaborate  Roman  Catholic 
ritual.  It  is  this  priestly  document  which  has 
supplied  Christian  defenders  of  the  faith  with 
the  hopeless  task  of  finding  moral  justification 
for  the  slaughter  of  the  Canaanites,  for  only  in 
the  later  writings  are  they  exterminated ;  in  the 
earlier  accounts  Hebrews  and  Canaanites  live  on 
together  in  the  same  land  many  years.  After 
the  teaching  of  the  priests  of  Israel  we  conceive 
that  sacrifices  and  offerings  were  the  most  im- 
portant matters  God  had  to  convey  to  His  chil- 


OLD   TESTAMENT   DIFFICULTIES        63 

dren  for  well-nigh  two  thousand  years,  and  we 
naively  suppose  that  this  elaborate  system  of 
ritual  and  ceremony,  with  the  entire  moral  law, 
sprang  into  existence  almost  in  a  day  at  the 
beginning  of  the  national  life.  Thus  it  has 
been  impossible  to  conceive  of  any  develop- 
ment of  Old  Testament  religion,  since  accord- 
ing to  the  theory  the  whole  was  present  at  the 
beginning,  and  succeeding  generations  had  no 
need  to  struggle  their  way  up  into  the  truth, 
but  merely  to  obey  a  law  which  had  come  down 
from  Heaven. 

Herein  lies  the  chief  difficulty  of  under- 
standing the  Old  Testament.  It  is  not  the 
largeness  of  the  book,  nor  the  remoteness  of 
its  life,  nor  the  oriental  character  of  its  imagery, 
nor  the  obscurity  of  its  ideas.  It  is  unintelligible, 
and  therefore  uninteresting,  because  one  can- 
not follow  the  development  of  its  thought  and 
its  religious  conceptions.  Its  first  rude  be- 
ginnings of  belief  in  God  and  crude  endeavors 
to  do  His  will  are  hidden  in  fragmentary 
narratives  in  Judges  and  Samuel  and  in  por- 
tions  of   the   Pentateuch.     Its   early   days   of 


64  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

strength  and  its  magnificent  rise  to  spiritual 
religion  are  covered  up  in  the  obscure  and  diffi- 
cult orations  of  the  prophets.  But  in  the  times 
of  its  decay,  when  the  prophet  had  given  way 
to  the  priest,  the  records  of  its  rise  were  taken 
in  hand  by  small-minded  men  who  judged  all 
things  by  the  petty  ritualistic  standards  of  their 
time,  and  thus  the  priestly  stamp  was  impressed 
upon  the  whole. 

The  way  to  an  understanding  of  the  Old 
Testament  lies  through  criticism.  The  Old 
Testament  will  ever  remain  an  enigma  and  a 
riddle  until  it  is  understood  as  a  growth.  It 
will  hold  men  back  from  their  best  estate  in 
piety  and  morals  so  long  as  they  yield  it  hom- 
age as  alike  the  word  of  God  in  every  part. 
The  common  man  must  be  taught  to  discern 
between  the  diverse  sorts  of  religious  docu- 
ments, which  vary  in  historical  trustworthi- 
ness, and  mislead  often  as  to  their  origin  and 
their  true  position  in  the  growth  of  piety.  The 
criticism  which  is  now  the  exercise  of  the  schools 
must  become  the  practice  of  the  private  student 
who  turns  to  the  Bible  for  moral  encourage- 


OLD  TESTAMENT   DIFFICULTIES        6$ 

ment  and  religious  illumination.  The  Church 
must  teach  the  Old  Testament  as  the  critics 
interpret  it,  if  her  more  progressive  members 
are  to  preserve  their  regard  for  Scripture.  The 
modern  man  understands  only  that  in  which 
he  can  trace  cause  and  effect,  and  knows  his- 
tory and  biography  only  as  progress  and  de- 
velopment. Without  criticism  no  history  of 
Old  Testament  faith  is  possible,  and  widespread 
popular  interest  in  the  Scriptures,  which  above 
others  were  written  for  our  learning,  waits 
for  fearless  and  earnest  presentation,  from  the 
pulpit  as  well  as  from  the  lecturer's  chair, 
of  the  methods  and  principles  by  which  knowl- 
edge of  the  growth  of  Israel's  faith  has  been 
attained.  Critical  use  of  the  Old  Testament 
alone  makes  it  intelligible,  spares  one  the  harm 
which  results  from  promiscuous  adoption  of  its 
precepts,  and  renders  possible  the  benefit  which 
is  theirs  who  work  their  way  close  to  the  creators 
of  the  world's  highest  religious  truths. 


CHAPTER  III 

THE    FIVE    POINTS    OF    OLD    TESTAMENT 
CRITICISM 

Despite  all  that  has  been  said  and  written 
concerning  the  newer  knowledge  of  the  Old 
Testament,  it  is  doubtful  whether  any  large 
number  of  intelligent  readers  of  the  Bible  possess 
a  clear  and  accurate  notion  of  just  how  the  views 
urged  by  modern  scholars  differ  from  those 
which  have  formerly  obtained.  It  is  imagined 
in  some  quarters  that  the  sponsors  of  the  newer 
theories  desire  to  secure  relaxation  for  them- 
selves and  others  from  the  strict  requirements 
which  the  men  of  old  time  deduced  from  the 
Scriptures,  and  that  the  higher  criticism  is  part 
of  a  general  movement  in  the  direction  of  moral 
laxity  and  religious  indifference.  It  is  doubt- 
less true  that  motives  of  this  sort  have  had 
weight  with  some,  but  the  movement  as  a 
whole  is  too  large,  is  too  intimately  mingled 
with  the  intellectual  currents  of  the  time,  and 
66 


OLD   TESTAMENT   CRITICISM  ^-J 

includes  among  its  followers  too  many  devoted 
men  of  earnest  godliness,  to  be  attributed  to 
such  unworthy  impulses.  Neither  is  it  true 
that  there  has  arisen  a  company  of  men  who  de- 
sire to  pick  and  choose  from  the  Bible  that  which 
is  in  accord  with  their  fancy  and  taste,  setting 
the  rest  aside  as  unacceptable.  No  scholar 
has  attempted  to  draw  any  line  between  that 
which  is  inspired  and  that  which  is  uninspired, 
and  certainly  no  one  has  any  desire  to  make  the 
Bible  any  smaller,  to  remove  from  it  any  book 
or  portion  of  a  book,  or  to  alter  its  text  and 
change  its  meaning.  On  the  contrary,  there  is 
persistent  and  strenuous  effort,  especially  on 
the  part  of  advanced  students,  to  secure  the  pur- 
est text  and  the  most  accurate  interpretation ; 
and  the  discovery  of  any  additional  sources  of 
information,  like  the  Moabite  Stone,  the  Tell-el- 
Amarna  tablets,  or  the  Aramaic  papyri  of  Ele- 
phantine, is  hailed  with  greatest  delight.  While 
the  idea  of  the  supernatural  which  prevails 
among  progressive  modern  students  differs  from 
that  most  widely  prevalent  in  former  genera- 
tions, it  cannot  fairly  be  maintained  that  a  new 


6S  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

attitude  toward  miracle  has  brought  about  the 
remarkable  revision  of  opinion  as  to  the  litera- 
ture and  history  of  the  ancient  Hebrews  which 
recent  times  have  witnessed.  It  is  more  cor- 
rect to  say  that  men's  ideas  of  the  action 
of  God  in  the  affairs  of  men  have  changed 
through  new  insight  into  the  Biblical  history, 
than  it  is  to  contend  that  a  philosophical 
opinion  of  the  supernatural  has  reconstructed 
the  history. 

All  talk,  therefore,  about  ''tearing  the  Bible 
to  pieces,"  "cutting  it  all  out  but  the  covers," 
about  "hostile  critics,"  "enemies  of  the  Bible," 
etc.,  is  beside  the  mark.  We  have  to  do  in  this 
matter  with  a  particular  application  of  methods 
which  are  prevailing  in  all  historical  investiga- 
tion, with  a  specific  instance  of  the  broaden- 
ing of  knowledge  in  the  entire  field  of  the  past, 
with  truer  appreciation  of  how  great  movements 
had  their  rise  and  great  truths  came  to  their 
might.  Given  a  history  of  Rome  like  that  of 
Mommsen,  and  students  could  no  more  help 
working  out  a  similar  history  of  ancient  Israel, 
than   American  steel-makers  could  refuse  to 


OLD   TESTAMENT   CRITICISM  69 

change  the  methods  of  their  industry  after  the 
discoveries  of  Sir  Henry  Bessemer  in  England. 
New  principles  of  investigation  are  bound  to 
flow  over  from  one  province  into  another,  and 
what  von  Ranke  called  "going  back  of  the 
documents"  has  become  so  fixed  a  habit  with 
all  investigators  of  the  past  that  the  ancient 
records  of  our  religion  cannot  possibly  resist 
their  application. 

It  ought  to  be  possible  to  summarize  in  brief 
compass  the  results  of  the  application  of  the 
principles  of  historical  science  to  the  books  of 
the  Old  Testament,  and  to  state  with  clearness 
the  leading  facts  in  which  modern  students  are 
substantially  agreed.  John  Calvin's  doctrine, 
radical  in  its  time,  won  speedy  vogue,  in  part 
at  least,  because  his  system  could  be  reduced 
to  the  famous  "Five  Points  of  Calvinism." 
An  attempt  to  formulate  five  points  of  Old 
Testament  criticism  may  therefore  be  worth 
while.  We  will  take  them  up  in  logical  order, 
and  attempt  a  brief  consideration  of  their 
outlines. 


70  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

I.    THE  TRUSTWORTHINESS  OF  THE  HISTORICAL 
BOOKS 

Criticism  is  so  generally  supposed  to  be 
dominated  by  the  spirit  of  negation  and  denial 
that  it  may  come  with  a  bit  of  surprise  to  some 
to  have  its  first  point  headed  "The  Trustworthi- 
ness of  the  Historical  Books."  Yet  unless  it 
is  clearly  perceived  that  the  starting-point  of 
the  new  construction  of  Israel's  history  is  the 
reliability  of  the  records,  the  real  character 
of  the  movement  will  be  misunderstood.  No 
one  pretends  to  have  any  wiser  information  as 
to  what  occurred  in  the  times  of  Moses  and 
David  than  is  furnished  by  the  Bible  itself,  and 
no  one  imagines  that  any  recent  discoveries 
of  monuments  or  manuscripts  can  do  anything 
more  than  supplement  the  sources  of  informa- 
tion which  have  been  available  to  all  for  centu- 
ries. Some  students  have  a  way  of  writing 
about  "our  sources"  as  if  private  avenues  of 
information  were  open  to  the  elect ;  such,  how- 
ever, is  not  the  case,  for  even  the  archaeological 
finds  are  speedily  made  available  for  general 


OLD  TESTAMENT   CRITICISM  71 

use,  and  for  the  most  part  the  newer  theories 
are  founded  upon  passages  which  are  perfectly 
familiar,  but  whose  real  significance  has  been 
unobserved. 

It  is  a  question  of  interpretation,  of  the  force 
and  credence  one  thinks  should  be  given  to 
passages  which  appear  to  be  mutually  contra- 
dictory. Every  careful  reader  must  realize 
that  the  Old  Testament  is  a  broadly  tolerant 
book,  that  it  includes  varying  types  of  piety 
and  divergent  conceptions  of  the  history  which 
it  recites.  Leviticus  is  certainly  not  like  the 
Psalms,  nor  Joshua  like  Hosea,  nor  Isaiah  like 
Haggai.  The  older  view  of  Hebrew  religion  is 
based  upon  that  type  of  piety  which  is  most 
prominent  in  the  Old  Testament,  which  is  most 
easily  read  from  the  surface;  the  newer  view 
is  founded  upon  conceptions  which  do  not 
thrust  themselves  out  so  plainly,  which  are 
hidden  away  in  the  historical  books  and  in  ob- 
scure references  in  the  prophets.  The  issue 
is  whether  we  shall  take  the  latter  at  their  face 
value  and  interpret  the  views  more  emphatically 
enunciated   as   a  later   understanding  of  the 


72  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

events,  or  whether  we  shall  accept  the  construc- 
tion of  the  history  that  lies  on  the  surface  of 
the  documents  as  entirely  reliable,  and  explain 
the  passages  which  appear  to  imply  another 
order  of  events  as  best  we  may.  The  modern 
view  maintains  that  the  references  to  religious 
practices  in  the  books  of  Judges,  Samuel,  and 
Kings  are  perfectly  frank  and  reliable  accounts 
of  the  religious  customs  and  beliefs  that  pre- 
vailed in  Israel  at  that  time,  the  best  that  men 
knew  in  those  days,  and  therefore  that  we  must 
frame  our  history  of  the  religious  development 
of  the  Hebrew  people  accordingly,  no  matter 
how  radically  it  may  force  us  to  change  our 
views  of  the  date  and  authorship  of  many  of  the 
ancient  documents  and  institutions. 

One  reads  in  the  book  of  Judges  of  Gideon, 
the  leader  of  the  three  hundred  who  vanquished 
the  hordes  of  Midianites  and  made  the  "day 
of  Midian"  proverbial.^  It  is  recorded  that 
Gideon  made  request  of  his  soldiers  for  the 
golden  ear-rings  they  had  taken  in  spoil,  and 
that  he  made  an  ephod,  a  molten  image,  of  the 
^  Isaiah  9  4. 


OLD   TESTAMENT   CRITICISM  73 

gold,  and  set  it  up  as  an  idol  in  Ophrah,  the 
city  of  his  fathers.^  There  can  be  no  doubt  of 
the  loyalty  to  Israel's  God  of  the  man  who  fought 
to  the  cry,  ''  The  sword  of  the  Lord  and  of 
Gideon!"  Not  the  slightest  question  is  raised 
as  to  his  piety  and  good  faith  in  making  an 
image  in  honor  of  his  victory  and  for  a  religious 
use.  Gideon  was  the  first  man  in  Israel  in  his 
day,  and  the  conclusion  would  seem  to  be  in- 
evitable that  the  piety  of  the  nation  as  a  whole 
was  not  at  this  time  on  a  higher  plane  than  that 
implied  by  this  ephod  before  which  men  wor- 
shipped to  determine  the  will  of  God. 

One  of  the  most  enlightening  narratives  of 
the  Old  Testament  for  the  determination  of  early 
Hebrew  religion  is  the  account  of  the  idol 
of  Micah  and  the  migration  of  the  Danites.^ 
The  story  is  delightfully  simple  and  naive,  and 
one  cannot  refuse  the  conviction  that  it  reflects 
in  utmost  fidelity  social  and  religious  condi- 
tions in  the  period  following  the  settlement  in 
Canaan.     A  party  of  five  Danite  soldiers,  in 

*  Judges  8  24,  27. 
^  Judges  17  and  18. 


74  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

search  of  a  new  home  for  their  clan,  light  upon 
the  abode  of  a  certain  Micah,  in  the  hill  country 
of  Ephraim.  This  Micah  had  a  shrine  in  his 
house,  a  graven  image  and  a  molten  image, 
sacred  to  Jehovah,  God  of  Israel,  and  he  had 
also  a  Levite  as  priest.  The  five  wandering 
Danites  seek  the  benefits  of  divination  at  the 
hand  of  this  priest,  and  are  encouraged  in  their 
journey,  which,  indeed,  has  a  prosperous  issue. 
When  they  come  Micah's  way  again,  this  time 
leading  the  entire  tribe,  with  six  hundred 
fighting  men,  to  the  new  home  they  had  pros- 
pected, they  return  evil  for  hospitality,  and 
carry  off  with  them  both  Micah's  images  and 
his  priest,  and  reply  tauntingly  as  the  outraged 
owner  of  the  idols  undertakes  to  recover  his 
property, ''What  aileth  thee?"  —  the  ancient 
equivalent  of,  "What  is  the  matter  with  you?" 
The  Danites  are  too  strong  for  Micah,  and  they 
set  up  his  idols  and  establish  his  priest  in  their 
new  home  in  the  extreme  north  of  Israel,  and 
thus  was  founded  the  city  we  know  from  the 
proverb,  "From  Dan  to  Beersheba." 
It  is  clear  as  day  from  this  story  that  in  those 


OLD   TESTAMENT   CRITICISM  75 

days  any  one  who  could  afford  it,  and  was  pious 
enough,  could  have  a  shrine  in  his  house,  sup- 
port his  own  priest,  and  make  use  of  images 
and  idols,  without  the  slightest  fear  of  offend- 
ing the  God  of  Israel.  Religion  was  a  private 
matter,  it  was  governed  by  custom  rather  than 
by  law,  and  it  was  exceedingly  crude  in  both 
doctrine  and  ritual. 

One  desiring  to  study  thoroughly  the  religion 
of  the  Old  Testament  could  not  do  better  than 
to  take  the  entire  book  of  Judges,  or  the  books 
of  Samuel,  and  make  a  study  of  the  religious 
beliefs  and  usages  implied  in  their  narratives, 
not  reading  into  them  what  is  not  there,  nor 
supposing  that  beliefs  which  are  unexpressed 
are  to  be  taken  for  granted,  but  simply  formu- 
lating the  system  of  religion  to  which  those 
books  alone  bear  witness.  The  result  would  be 
a  very  simple  and  crude  form  of  piety,  entirely 
different  from  the  fully  developed  religion  of 
Israel.  It  is  the  first  point  of  Old  Testament 
criticism  that  this  result  is  historically  correct; 
that  Israel  did  come  into  Canaan  with  very 
crude  notions  about  God  and  His  command- 


76  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

ments,  and  that  the  ideas  of  the  nation  for  a 
long  time  continued  crude,  only  after  centuries 
emerging  in  the  high  faith  of  the  nobler  Psalms 
and  prophecies.  Gideon  did  not  lapse  from 
a  nobler  religion  existent  in  his  time  when  he 
melted  the  ear-rings  into  an  ephod;  Jephthah 
did  not  transgress  any  known  law  when  he 
sacrificed  his  daughter  because  of  his  vow  to 
the  Lord;  Samuel  was  not  doing  anything  in 
the  least  out  of  the  way  when  he  led  a  village 
feast  with  a  sacrifice  in  the  high  place  near  his 
home ;  Saul  was  preventing  sin,  not  committing 
it,  when  he  had  a  great  stone  rolled  before  him 
on  the  battlefield  that  he  might  himself  make 
sacrifices  upon  it.  These  men  were  doing  the 
best  they  knew ;  they  were  serving  God  accord- 
ing to  the  best  light  of  their  time:  and  the 
inevitable  conclusion  is  that  Israel's  religion 
had  a  feeble  beginning,  and  that  the  represen- 
tation of  the  priestly  writings  and  the  later 
historical  books,  which  picture  it  as  perfect 
at  the  time  of  the  entrance  into  Canaan,  is  the 
idealization  of  a  later  time. 
The  early  historical  books,  especially  Judges 


OLD   TESTAMENT   CRITICISM  jy 

and  Samuel,  are  the  true  point  of  departure 
for  the  understanding  of  Israel's  political  and 
social  life,  as  well  as  of  her  religion.  It  is 
there  we  meet  with  documents  most  nearly  con- 
temporary ;  and  it  is  perhaps  the  greatest  differ- 
ence between  the  older  and  newer  methods  of 
looking  at  the  Old  Testament  that  according 
to  the  older  view  this  period  was  a  sort  of  inter- 
regnum, a  time  of  barbarism  between  two  ages 
of  piety;  while  according  to  the  newer  view 
these  books  are  faithful  witnesses  of  the  early 
life  of  Israel,  and  the  period  they  describe  was 
the  day  of  small  things  out  of  which  the  true 
Israel  came  to  be. 


II.    THE  ORIGIN  OF  DEUTERONOMY  IN  THE  TIME 
OF  JO  SI  AH  ^ 

If  one  admit  this  first  point  of  Old  Testament 
criticism,  the  second  inevitably  follows.  The 
book  of  Deuteronomy  prohibits  all  such  altars 
as  those  upon  which  Samuel  sacrificed  in  his 
native  village  and  which  Saul  built  upon  the 

^  Cir.  621  B.C. 


yS  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

battlefield,  and  enjoins  that  all  places  of  offering 
outside  Jerusalem  shall  be  destroyed  and  defiled. 
"Ye  shall  break  down  their  altars,  and  dash  in 
pieces  their  pillars,  and  burn  their  Asherim  with 
fire."  "But  unto  the  place  which  the  Lord 
your  God  shall  choose  out  of  all  your  tribes,  to 
put  his  name  there,  even  unto  his  habitation 
shall  ye  seek,  and  thither  thou  shalt  come :  and 
thither  ye  shall  bring  your  burnt  offerings,  and 
your  sacrifices,  and  your  tithes."  ^  A  central 
sanctuary,  for  all  Israel,  and  that  alone  legal, 
is  the  burden  of  the  book  so  far  as  it  bears  upon 
ceremonial  practices. 

But  how  could  good  men  like  Gideon  and 
Samuel  have  constructed  images  for  the  wor- 
ship of  Jehovah,  and  sacrificed  on  high  places 
where  they  pleased,  had  they  been  familiar 
with  any  such  positive  prohibition  of  these 
practices  as  that  enunciated  by  Deuteronomy  ? 
The  mighty  agony  of  Elijah,  the  zealot  for  the 
pure  and  undefiled  religion  of  the  fathers,  was 
because  they  had  broken  down  the  altars  of 
Jehovah  and  slain  the  prophets  who  ministered 

*Deut.  i2  3ff. 


OLD   TESTAMENT   CRITICISM  79 

at  them,^  —  the  very  thing  which  Deuteronomy 
commands.  With  Elijah's  own  hand  the  high 
place  on  Carmel  was  restored,  and  there  is 
not  the  slightest  evidence  that  he  had  any  spe- 
cial direction  to  build  again  this  particular 
sanctuary.  On  the  contrary,  the  act  was  the 
initiation  of  a  reformation  in  which  he  hoped 
to  carry  the  entire  nation.  The  argument  has 
the  greatest  weight  that  in  the  time  of  Elijah 
the  requirements  of  Deuteronomy  had  not 
been  conceived. 

But  in  2  Kings  ^  there  is  a  careful  account 
of  a  religious  reformation  which  occurred  in  the 
reign  of  Josiah,  621  B.C.,  which  was  brought 
about  by  the  discovery  of  a  "Book  of  the  Law" 
in  the  precincts  of  the  temple.  It  was  long 
ago  observed  ^  that  the  reformation  which  was 
then  enacted  was  precisely  in  accord  with  cer- 
tain portions  of  the  book  of  Deuteronomy, 
and  that  only  in  that  book  are  precepts  to  be 
found  similar  to  those  which  Josiah  enacted. 

*  I  Kings  19  10.  ^  Ch.  22. 

'  By  Hobbes ;  cf .  Cornill,  "  Introduction  to  the  Canonical 
Books  of  the  Old  Testament,"  p.  50. 


80  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

The  high  places  are  destroyed,  as  Deuteronomy 
enacts,  and  the  pillars  and  the  asherim  are 
burned  and  broken.  The  passover  is  kept, 
precisely  according  to  the  book,  and  the  very 
temper  and  spirit  of  the  reformation  is  that 
enjoined  in  the  Deuteronomic  law.  Since, 
therefore,  there  is  good  evidence  that  this  law 
was  unknown  in  former  ages,  even  by  political 
and  religious  leaders  like  Samuel  and  Elijah, 
Saul  and  David,  and  since  it  is  very  clear  that 
the  law  came  into  force  at  this  time,  and  the 
very  prominence  of  Jerusalem  is  witness  that 
it  never  fully  lost  its  force,  the  conclusion  would 
seem  entirely  justified  that  Deuteronomy  had 
its  origin  not  long  before  the  reformation  under 
Josiah,  the  king  who  made  it  effective. 

This  conclusion  is  measurably  strengthened 
by  the  Aramaic  papyri  recently  discovered  on 
the  island  of  Elephantine  in  the  Upper  Nile.* 
These  documents  make  clear  mention  of  a 
Jewish  temple,  with  an  altar  to  Jehovah  for 
meal-offerings  and  burnt-offerings,  served  by 
devout  and  regularly  constituted  priests,  in  the 

*  Translated  in  The  Independent^  Dec.  s,  1907,  p.  1385  f. 


OLD   TESTAMENT   CRITICISM  8 1 

fifth  century  B.C.  So  far  from  this  altar  and  its 
sacrifices  being  in  contravention  to  current 
Hebrew  piety,  these  Egyptian  Jews  wrote  to 
"Jehohanan  the  high  priest,  and  his  compan- 
ions the  priests  in  Jerusalem,"  in  earnest  hope 
that  he  would  help  them  repair  the  altar  after 
it  had  been  broken  down.  Because  of  its 
destruction  these  pious  men  put  on  sackcloth 
and  fasted  and  prayed  to  Jehovah,  and  their 
wives  became  as  widows.  In  no  portion  of  the 
Old  Testament  does  there  breathe  a  spirit  of 
more  loyal  attachment  to  the  God  of  Israel 
and  sincere  desire  to  obey  His  commandments 
perfectly,  and  this  goes  to  show  that  the  law 
of  the  central  sanctuary  had  by  no  means  the 
force  in  ancient  Hebrew  piety  which  the  book 
of  Deuteronomy  would  lead  us  to  imagine. 

This  point  is  very  important  for  the  under- 
standing of  Hebrew  history.  The  authors  and 
editors  of  the  historical  books  judge  the  kings 
and  princes  of  their  narratives  by  Deuteronomic 
standards  of  moral  and  religious  right.  This 
applies  to  the  framework  of  the  Judges,  to 
many  of  the  narratives  in  Samuel,  and  especially 


82  THE  CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

to  the  books  of  Kings.  It  is  owing  to  the  Deu- 
teronomic  point  of  view  that  we  learned  in  our 
childhood  of  the  "good  kings"  and  the  "bad 
kings,"  each  ruler  being  positively  one  or  the 
other,  the  standard  in  each  case  being  obedience 
to  the  commandment  to  worship  at  Jerusalem 
only.  It  is  only  when  one  is  aware  of  this  point 
of  view  of  the  historians,  and  judges  their 
work  accordingly,  that  he  is  able  to  arrive  at  a 
clear  conception  of  the  real  course  of  Hebrew 
history.  Because  so  much  of  the  biblical  narra- 
tive has  been  colored  by  Deuteronomic  convic- 
tion, the  origin  of  the  code  in  the  time  of  Josiah 
deserves  to  be  called  the  second  point  in  mod- 
ern Old  Testament  criticism. 


III.     THE    FOUR    SOURCES   OF   THE   HEXATEUCH 

Deuteronomy  is  one  of  a  collection  of  six 
books  which  give  the  Hebrew  account  of  the 
beginning  of  the  world  and  of  the  Jewish  na- 
tion, and  trace  the  national  history  down  to 
the  settlement  of  Canaan.  The  third  point  of 
Old  Testament  criticism  is  that  this  collection 


OLD  TESTAMENT   CRITICISM  83 

of  books  was  composed  from  four  different 
documents,  or  collections  of  narratives,  which 
may  be  separated  one  from  the  other  and  in  part 
restored,  though  with  serious  omissions  in  the 
restorations,  especially  in  the  earlier  docu- 
ments. 

Every  one  has  noticed  that  the  early  books 
of  the  Bible  are  full  of  repetitions,  and  that 
passages  of  different  point  of  view  and  of  di- 
verse religious  quality  lie  side  by  side.  It  re- 
quires no  expert  knowledge  to  discern  that  there 
is  great  divergence  between  the  story  of  Joseph, 
with  its  marvellous  eloquence  and  its  exceed- 
ing human  interest,  and  the  sacerdotal  enthu- 
siasm of  the  minute  instructions  for  the  con- 
struction of  the  tabernacle.  The  analysis  of 
the  Pentateuch  is  founded  upon  just  such  large 
and  vital  facts.  It  is  not  a  question  of  vocabu- 
lary and  syntax,  although  students  employ 
observations  in  these  fields  as  tests  for  minute 
divisions.  The  real  basis  of  the  division  into 
documents  is  divergence  in  historical  and  reli- 
gious point  of  view.  Proceeding  by  these 
criteria,  scholars  resolve  the  Hexateuch  into  a 


84  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

document  composed  by  a  Judaean  historian  (J) 
about  850  B.C.,  an  Ephraimitic  history  (E)  writ- 
ten about  a  century  later,  the  code  of  Deuteron- 
omy (D)  about  621,  and  the  priestly  documents 
(P),  which  were  not  completed  until  500  B.C. 

It  has  been  the  fashion  with  some  who  have 
accepted  this  theory  to  say  that  it  is  of  no  great 
importance  whether  one  man  or  four  men  wrote 
a  book,  since  the  book  remains  the  same.  It 
may  be  urged  that  in  a  generation  which  for 
the  most  part  cannot  tell  whether  Elijah  came 
before  Joshua,  or  Isaiah  before  David,  it  is 
of  no  sensational  importance  whether  a  writing 
was  composed  850  B.C.  or  1200  B.C.  It  is  a 
mistake,  however,  to  underestimate  the  prac- 
tical consequences  of  modern  views  concerning 
the  Old  Testament.  The  subject  in  hand  is 
not  a  trifling  matter  of  the  date  and  name  of 
a  particular  author;  it  affects  unquestionably 
one's  idea  of  the  character  of  some  of  the  most 
important  books  of  the  Bible,  and  therefore 
one's  belief  as  to  how  God  accomplishes  His 
purposes  in  the  world  in  which  we  live. 

It  is  the  modern  view,  not  merely  that  four 


OLD   TESTAMENT   CRITICISM  85 

documents  were  employed  in  the  composition 
of  the  Hexateuch,  but  also  that  the  principal 
document,  which  was  used  as  a  framework 
and  which  impresses  its  views  upon  our  ideas 
of  the  entire  history,  is  the  product  of  the 
priestly  school  of  writers,  and  is  therefore 
dominated  by  the  ideas  which  obtained  in  the 
narrow  and  poverty-stricken  days  of  Israel's 
faith.  This  document  had  its  origin  a  century 
farther  from  the  time  to  which  it  imputes  the 
laws  it  records  than  we  are  distant  from  the 
days  of  Columbus.  It  is  concerned  with  the 
lower  elements  of  religion,  laws  of  diet,  pre- 
scriptions about  clean  and  unclean,  regulations 
for  a  just  and  duly  constituted  priesthood ;  and 
with  these  are  mingled  a  somewhat  superficial 
and  mechanical  notion  of  sin  and  forgiveness. 
The  deep  piety  of  the  Psalms  and  the  moral 
fervor  of  the  prophets  are  on  a  distinctly  higher 
level  than  this  priestly  law-book,  and  the 
relation  of  one  to  the  other  is  not  that  of  fee- 
ble beginning  and  subsequent  strength,  but  of 
retrograde  from  a  worthier  life  and  thought. 
Yet  owing  to  its  prominence  in  the  Hexa- 


S6  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

teuch,  and  to  the  zeal  and  skill  with  which  it 
reiterates  its  views,  it  is  precisely  this  writing 
which  most  influences  the  ordinary  reader. 
The  popular  notions,  as  existent  at  this  day,  of 
the  origin  of  the  Jewish  race,  the  establishment 
of  the  Hebrew  religion,  the  beginnings  of  faith 
in  God  and  of  His  worship  and  service,  spring 
from  this  product  of  decadent  Hebrew  piety. 
Convictions  widely  prevalent  and  of  large  influ- 
ence on  some  of  the  vital  questions  of  morals 
and  religion  have  the  same  source.  The  fresher 
and  more  vital  narratives  of  the  Judasan  and 
Ephraimitic  historians,  from  which  one  mJght 
set  out  for  a  sympathetic  study  of  the  develop- 
ment of  religious  thought  and  practice,  are 
passed  over  lightly;  but  the  concise  and  sys- 
tematic scheme  of  the  priestly  histories  lingers 
in  the  memory  and  forms  the  basis  of  religious 
judgments,  some  of  which  do  not  contribute 
to  spiritual  growth.  The  students  who  have 
disentangled  the  narratives  have  done  more 
than  work  out  a  puzzle;  they  have  enabled 
those  who  will  learn  from  them  to  find  their 
way  through  the  latest  and  least  vital  stratum 


OLD   TESTAMENT   CRITICISM  8/ 

of  Hebrew  belief  to  the  more  vigorous  and 
truthful  convictions  of  earlier  writers,  which 
have  lain  for  centuries  almost  unnoticed. 

IV.    THE  GRADUAL  GROWTH  OF  HEBREW  LEGIS- 
LATION 

Study  of  the  law  of  ancient  Israel  reveals  the 
fact  that  the  legislation  of  the  Old  Testament 
w^as  reached  only  through  many  enactments 
extending  over  a  long  period  of  time.  The 
traditional  view  is  that  Hebrew  law  had  no 
history,  that  the  entire  body  of  law  was  miracu- 
lously revealed  through  Moses  on  the  summit 
of  Sinai.  This  is  certainly  contrary  to  expe- 
rience, since  law  is  invariably  a  growth,  spring- 
ing out  of  particular  cases  as  they  arise  in 
human  affairs,  and  gradually  systematized  and 
brought  into  a  code.  We  think  our  Constitu- 
tion was  long  in  the  making,  when  we  read  the 
debates  on  its  adoption;  and  yet  Gladstone, 
mindful  of  the  generations  which  have  labored 
to  produce  other  systems  of  fundamental  law, 
spoke  of  the  American  Constitution  as  springing 
in  a  moment  from  the  minds  of  its  framers. 


88  THE   CHRISTIAN  FAITH 

There  are  plentiful  indications  in  the  Old 
Testament  laws  that  they  too  were  long  in  the 
making.  A  legislation  given  entire  and  at  once 
would  be  orderly  and  systematic,  laws  on  sim- 
ilar subjects  being  found  together,  and  it  would 
be  a  unity,  without  duplicates.  But  we  find  in 
the  Old  Testament  a  large  number  of  dupli- 
cates, as,  for  example,  the  Ten  Commandments 
both  in  Exodus  20  and  Deuteronomy  5,  and  we 
have  codes  in  different  stages,  showing  difference 
in  moral  and  religious  standard.^  Moreover, 
since  the  discovery  of  the  Code  of  Hammurabi, 
the  Babylonian  king  who  lived  about  2000  B.C., 
it  can  be  proved  that  the  laws  of  the  Hebrews 
were  many  of  them  simply  adopted  from  legis- 
lation which  had  been  the  common  property  of 
civilized  peoples  in  the  East  for  many  centuries. 
Out  of  forty-five  judgments  in  the  Book  of  the 
Covenant,^  thirty-five  have  points  of  contact 
with  the  laws  which  the  French  excavators  dug 
up  at  Susa  some  five  years  ago.  The  conclusion 
is,  not  that  Hebrew  legislators  slavishly  copied 

*  Exodus  20  22-23  19,  and  34  10-27. 
'  Exodus  20  22-23  ^^' 


OLD   TESTAMENT   CRITICISM  89 

Babylonian  laws,  but  that  Babylonian  insti- 
tutions had  written  themselves  into  the  civiliza- 
tion of  the  world,  and  that  they  were  taken  up 
by  the  Hebrews  from  time  to  time  in  a  free 
spirit. 

It  were  a  trifling  matter  whether  a  few  books 
of  law  were  written  by  one  man  or  by  twenty 
men,  at  one  time  or  during  a  long  period,  as 
far  as  mere  fact  and  information  are  concerned. 
But  study  of  Hebrew  legislation  in  its  origin 
and  growth  reveals  the  fact  that  whatever  is 
unfavorable  in  our  impression  of  Jewish  law, 
whatever  breathes  a  spirit  of  narrowness  and 
exclusiveness  and  of  smallness  in  the  affairs  of 
God,  comes  from  the  later  strata,  when  priests 
were  the  only  legislators.  These  narrow  views, 
these  small  prescriptions  of  acts  required  of 
God,  are  projected  back  into  the  Mosaic  period, 
enunciated  as  if  Moses  were  their  author ;  and 
the  result  is  that,  with  such  notions  of  early 
Hebrew  life  in  our  minds,  a  true  understanding 
of  the  growth  and  development  of  Hebrew  law 
and  religion  is  impossible.  The  spirit  of  the 
Hebrew  legislation  is  misconceived  when  it  is 


90  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

not  understood  as  a  growth.  One  is  tempted  to 
regard  it  as  largely  petty  trifles  of  ritual  and 
ceremony,  whereas  a  careful  and  comparative 
study  of  its  development  reveals  a  humane  and 
uplifting  system  of  equal  justice  and  moral 
right,  with  passion  for  the  rights  of  the  poor 
and  persistent  recognition  of  the  higher  moral 
obligations.  Thus  again  the  teaching  of  mod- 
ern criticism  issues  in  worthier  ethical  ideals 
and  nobler  religious  principles. 


V.    THE  WORK  OF  THE  PROPHETS  IN  THE  RELI- 
GION OF  ISRAEL 

The  fifth  point  is  perhaps  the  most  important, 
and  is  the  truth  in  which  all  recent  study  of  the 
Old  Testament  has  its  culmination.  With  the 
old  dating  of  books  and  documents,  and  espe- 
cially of  the  law,  the  religion  of  Israel  was  con- 
ceived as  an  utterly  marvellous  projection  of 
divine  truth  upon  the  earth,  without  endeavor 
or  worth  on  the  part  of  its  human  recipients, 
save  the  humility  which  enabled  them  to  accept 
it.     The  Almighty  thundered,  and  his  servants 


OLD   TESTAMENT   CRITICISM  91 

recorded  His  speech,  and  the  religion  stood  forth 
entire  and  perfect.  This  view  has  made  an 
"act  of  God"  in  current  thought  something 
strange  to  ordinary  life,  and  has  removed  the 
history  of  the  Bible  from  sympathetic  and  in- 
structive appreciation. 

According  to  the  modern  view,  the  law  did 
not  precede  the  prophets,  but  the  prophets 
came  before  the  law,  and  were  indeed  the 
creators  of  the  moral  convictions  and  religious 
insights  embodied  in  the  law.  The  legal 
enactments  were  but  the  registration  of  the 
spiritual  convictions  of  determined  men,  whose 
eyes  God  had  opened.  Elijah  was  very  zealous 
for  the  cause  of  his  God,  and  very  true  and  single- 
eyed  in  his  vision,  and  the  work  of  his  great 
manhood  engraved  the  law,  *'Thou  shalt  have 
no  other  Gods  before  me."  We  cannot  in  all 
cases  name  the  particular  prophet  who  is 
responsible  for  a  moral  principle  or  a  religious 
precept,  since  the  habit  was  to  impute  each 
advance,  as  it  came  upon  the  horizon,  to  the 
great  founder  of  Israel's  piety.  That  Moses  is 
credited  with  more  than  he  is  entitled  to  seems 


92  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

evident  from  the  fact  that  the  law,  "Thou  shalt 
not  make  unto  thee  any  graven  image,"  is 
recorded  in  his  name,  while  actually  Moses 
employed  religiously  a  brazen  serpent,  which 
a  king  instructed  by  a  later  prophet  called  a 
piece  of  brass  and  destroyed  from  the  temple.* 
A  glorious  company  of  unremembered  prophets 
gave  their  lives  to  the  construction  of  Israel's 
piety  which  now  stands  in  the  name  of  Moses. 
The  more  one  studies  the  Old  Testament, 
the  clearer  it  becomes  that  the  faith  of  Israel 
was  wrought  out  in  the  souls  of  men.  Hebrew 
faith  was  vitally  achieved  in  deeds  of  daring 
courage,  in  the  struggles  of  men  of  heroic 
mould.  On  this  earth  the  great  fundamental 
principles  of  spiritual  religion  were  forged, 
and  in  the  hearts  of  men  of  like  passion  with 
ourselves.  It  was  the  prophets  who  made  pos- 
sible the  moral  elevation  of  the  law,  the  purity 
of  the  ancient  stories,  the  sweet  peace  and  ma- 
jestic trustfulness  of  the  Psalms,  and  the 
very  course  of  the  history  itself.  Without  her 
prophets,  Israel  would  have  had  no  message 
1  2  Kings  1 8  4. 


OLD   TESTAMENT   CRITICISM  93 

for  the  world.  With  them,  she  has  a  message 
which  the  world  can  never  forget.  They  were 
the  men  who  stood  for  right  when  all  advan- 
tage —  personal,  social,  political  —  lay  the 
other  way.  They  were  the  men  who  contended 
for  righteousness  still,  though  their  nation  was 
on  the  very  verge  of  doom.  They  were  the 
men  who  taught  that  God  is  served  only  in  the 
heart,  and  who  preserved  morals  and  piety  from 
dissolution  in  zeal  for  bloody  offerings.  The 
scholarship  which  finds  its  way  to  their  side 
and  enables  one  to  feel  the  pulse  of  their  heart- 
beat is  no  zeal  for  technicalities,  no  ambition 
for  knowledge  of  an  antiquarian's  trifles,  — 
it  is  rather  the  medium  by  which  one  finds 
his  way  to  spiritual  truth  on  which  manhood 
sufficient  to  stand  the  shock  of  this  modern  day 
is  nourished  and  made  strong.  By  means  of 
this  modern  knowledge  one  is  delivered  from 
a  thousand  inconsistencies  and  confusions 
which  prevent  clear  discernment  in  matters  of 
morals  and  faith,  and  the  true  character  and 
real  worth  of  religious  conviction  come  into  the 
clear. 


94  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

Appreciation  of  the  criticism  of  the  Old 
Testament  as  outlined  briefly  in  these  five  points 
is  therefore  an  intensely  practical  matter.  It 
does  not  destroy  the  value  of  the  ancient  rec- 
ords, but  it  enables  one  to  distinguish  between 
them,  to  free  his  mind  and  spirit  from  unworthy 
views  of  God  and  His  service,  and  to  put  first 
things  first,  as  did  the  prophet,  who  declared 
in  immortal  words  truth  which  Christianity 
does  not  transcend,  but  only  enforces  and  makes 
clear :  — 

"  Wherewith  shall  I  come  before  the  Lord,  and  bow 
myself  before  the  high  God?  shall  I  come  before  him 
with  burnt-offerings,  with  calves  a  year  old?  will  the 
Lord  be  pleased  with  thousands  of  rams,  or  with  ten 
thousands  of  rivers  of  oil  ?  shall  I  give  my  first-bom 
for  my  transgression,  the  fruit  of  my  body  for  the  sin 
of  my  soul?  He  hath  showed  thee,  O  man,  what  is 
good,  and  what  doth  the  Lord  require  of  thee,  but  to 
do  justly,  to  love  mercy,  and  to  walk  humbly  with  thy 
God?»» 

*  Micah  6  fr-8. 


CHAPTER  IV 

A  SKETCH  OF  THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  THE 
RELIGION  OF  ISRAEL  TO  THE  TIME  OF 
AMOS 

Some  thirteen  hundred  years  before  the  Chris- 
tian era  there  lived  in  Egyptian  territory,  on  the 
border  of  the  Arabian  desert,  a  loose  collection 
of  nomad  Semites,  who  had  driven  their  flocks 
of  sheep  and  goats  thither  from  out  the  wilder- 
ness, attracted  by  the  better  pasturage.  Some- 
where about  1250  B.C.  this  unorganized  mass  of 
herdsmen,  with  their  families  and  flocks,  threat- 
ened by  Egyptian  oppression,  and  stirred  by 
religious  impulse,  turned  their  faces  back  to  the 
desert  from  which  their  fathers  came.  Tyranny 
behind  them,  scarcity  and  want  around  them, 
they  pressed  their  way  northward  toward  the 
dreamland  of  the  Bedouin,  the  narrow  strip 
of  rolling  valley  and  mountain  which  the  Great 
Sea  fashions  by  her  mists  and  showers  into  a 
canvas  of  perfect  beauty,  to  hide  from  her  sight 
the  glare  and  the  wastes  of  the  hot  sands  beyond. 
95 


96  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

On  the  southerly  border  of  Canaan,  where 
garden  and  desert  contend  and  each  achieves 
partial  victory,  they  found  for  a  time  their 
habitation.  Here  in  turn  they  were  found,^  in 
the  waste  howling  wilderness,  by  the  wilder- 
ness God,  and  they  swore  a  compact  with  Him, 
and  he  became  their  God,  Jahveh,  God  of 
Sinai,  God  of  storms  and  God  of  war.^  The 
covenant  with  the  desert  God  pierced  deep  into 
the  soul  of  this  desert  folk,  and  wrought  in- 
eradicably  there  the  conviction  that  they  be- 
longed to  the  God  of  Sinai's  storms,  and  that 
He  belonged  to  them,  for  might  and  victory. 
They  found  Him  a  God  of  war,  of  the  tight- 
gripped  spear,  of  the  wails  of  a  doomed  city, 
of  the  sword  that  returns  not  empty.  Strength 
and  dominion  were  even  then  in  his  sanctuary, 
and  with  the  might  of  their  God  in  their  heart, 
the  men  of  the  desert,  uncultured,  unorganized, 
uncivilized,  set  out  on  their  way  in  history. 
Stirred  by  a  threat  of  dispossession  of  their 
holdings  in  the  Judaean  wilderness,  they  rallied 
for  war  with  the  king  who  threatened  them. 

^  Deut.  32  10^  Hos.  9  10.  ^  Jud.  5  s,  Deut.  ^^  2. 


THE  RELIGION   OF   ISRAEL  97 

Under  the  lead  of  their  God  they  subdued  the 
Amorite,  whose  height  was  like  the  height  of  ce- 
dars/ and  planted  themselves  firmly  in  the  king- 
dom of  Sihon,  from  which  they  looked  across 
to  the  alluring  hills  of  Judaea,  and  caught  the 
breath  of  her  honey-filled  forests  and  her  vine- 
laden  hillsides.  Not  as  a  united  people,^  —  for 
Israel  was  not  yet  a  nation  —  but  clan  by  clan, 
tribe  sometimes  helping  tribe,  but  more  often 
singly  and  alone,  they  pressed  for  a  foothold 
on  the  other  side  of  the  Jordan.  Simeon  and 
Levi  went  down  in  the  attack  and  disappear 
from  history.  The  tribes  of  Joseph  were  more 
successful,  and  Ephraim  became  a  people  of 
might. 

The  conquest  was  not  the  campaign  of  a  na- 
tion, by  one  army  and  under  one  leader.  It 
was  the  gradual  immigration  of  tribes  and  clans. 
It  was  partly  a  peaceful  settlement  of  unoccu- 
pied territory,  and  in  part  was  accompanied  by 
treaties  with  the  former  dwellers  and  oaths  of 
brotherhood.  The  Canaanites  remained  in  the 
cities  and  in  the  broad  valleys ;  the  new  dwellers 
^  Amos  2  9.  2  Judges  i. 


98  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

sought  the  hillsides  with  their  flocks,  and  cen- 
turies later  their  God  was  known  as  a  God  of 
the  hills.^  There  was  assimilation  between  the 
two  peoples:  the  shepherds  learned  agricul- 
ture and  settled  ways  of  life ;  they  adopted  the 
sacred  places  which  had  been  long  established 
in  the  land,  and  affixed  to  them  names  honored 
in  their  own  tradition.  They  waxed  fat  and 
kicked  against  the  austere,  meagre  cultus  of 
their  God  of  storms  and  war :  they  served  the 
gods  of  Canaan. 

But  fortunately  the  relations  were  not  all 
friendly.  In  the  broad  valleys  the  Canaanites 
had  mighty  cities,  and  the  men  of  the  cities 
oppressed  the  newly  come  peasants  of  the 
heights.  They  spoiled  their  harvests;  they 
made  slaves  of  their  sons  and  daughters.  There 
was  no  king  to  whom  to  make  appeal,  no  ruler 
to  whom  all  could  look  for  deliverance.  A  clan 
here,  a  tribe  there,  but  the  highways  between 
the  worshippers  of  the  storm  God  ceased  for 
lack  of  travellers,  and  no  spear  nor  sword 
was  seen  among  the  forty  thousand  of  Israel.^ 
*  I  Kings  20  23.  2  Judges  5  6,  8. 


THE   RELIGION   OF   ISRAEL  99 

Then  was  witnessed  a  thing  we  call  inspiration 
among  this  herdsmen  folk.  A  woman  felt  the 
stirring,  and  in  a  mighty  eloquence  of  which 
the  world  has  scarcely  known  the  like,  she  called 
the  mountain  people  from  the  holes  and  caves 
of  the  rocks,  summoned  a  clansman  to  leader- 
ship, infused  into  all  passion  for  victory  in  the 
name  of  the  desert  God;  and  her  wild  cry 
of  frenzy  for  her  people  and  her  people's  God 
sounds  quivering  and  thrilling  down  to  this 
day,  —  the  Song  of  Deborah,  the  earliest  monu- 
ment of  Hebrew  literature,  and  one  of  the  most 
intense  and  creative  outflashes  of  genius  that 
ever  wrought  in  the  making  of  men.^ 

Gilead  abode  beyond  the  Jordan,  Dan  re- 
mained in  his  ships,  and  Asher  sat  still  at  the 
haven  of  the  sea.^  There  was  no  compulsion 
among  the  tribes,  no  obligation  to  a  central 
power.  They  rallied  —  those  who  did  rally  — 
at  the  beacon  fire  of  prophecy,  not  at  the  order 
of  a  government  or  king.  The  nation  Israel 
was  not  yet.  There  was  only  a  scattering  of 
distantly  related  tribes,  who  believed  in  a  com- 

^  Judges  5.  2  Vs.  17. 


100  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

mon  God.  Israel  was  only  a  feeling  of  unity 
in  the  soul  of  a  woman,  and  that  sense  of  unity 
was  based  on  the  one  God  whom  all  worshipped. 
But  as  the  torrents  of  Jahveh  swept  them  on  to 
victory,  and  as  for  a  second  time  the  people  of 
the  desert  found  their  God,  and  from  their 
foothold  in  Canaan  took  heed  to  the  faith  that 
was  in  them,  they  found  Him  not  merely  the 
storm  God  of  the  wilderness,  rising  up  in  light 
from  Mount  Seir  and  glancing  from  Mount 
Paran ;  ^  not  merely  the  God  who  helped  in 
flight,  who  led  a  successful  panic  from  before 
the  gods  of  Egypt:  He  was  now  a  God  who 
faced  an  army  with  chariots  and  horse- 
men, and  who  could  lead  his  mountaineers 
against  a  people  of  long  cilivization ;  but  more 
than  that.  He  was  a  rally  cry  for  a  scattered 
folk,  the  hope  of  union  for  a  people  who  had 
journeyed  clan  by  clan,  and  fought  for  their 
homes  tribe  by  tribe ;  in  His  name  went  forth 
the  summons  to  united  action;  in  His  name 
the  hosts  assembled;  by  His  command  the 
Kishon  swept  them  on  to  victory ;  and  in  Him 
the  tribes  of  the  desert  were  fused  into  a  nation. 
*  Deut.  32  2. 


THE  RELIGION   OF   ISRAEL  lOI 

Beginning  far  back,  when  much  of  our  Old 
Testament  was  written,  the  history  of  these 
early  days  was  idealized,  and  the  events  were 
colored  by  the  imaginations  of  later  times  far 
other  than  they  were  in  reality.  The  temple 
services  and  institutions,  in  which  five  hundred 
years  later  Israel  found  its  life  and  unity,  when 
Assyria  and  Babylonia  had  taken  away  political 
independence,  were  written  back  into  the  far- 
away days,  and  the  historical  writings  of  the 
Old  Testament  have  been  revised  and  edited, 
in  the  form  in  which  they  now  stand,  on  the 
theory  that  the  highly  developed  religion,  which 
only  the  prophets  made  possible,  existed  and 
flourished  at  the  very  beginning  of  Hebrew 
history. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  however,  the  religion  of 
the  early  days  was  of  a  very  primitive  type. 
In  the  time  of  David,  Israel's  God  was  not  a 
world  God,  not  a  Master  of  all  nations  and 
peoples ;  far  less  was  He  the  creator  of  heaven 
and  earth;  He  was  the  God  of  Israel,  and  of 
Israel's  land,  brought  to  that  land  from 
the   desert.      He    could    not    be    worshipped 


102  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

outside  the  land  He  had  hallowed  to  him- 
self by  his  people's  conquests.  The  men  who 
forced  David  out  of  Israel's  territory  drove  him 
absolutely  away,  in  his  conviction,  from  the 
presence  of  his  God,  and  said  to  him,  "Go, 
serve  other  gods."  ^  The  man  to  whom  tradi- 
tion imputes  the  noblest  utterances  of  the  uni- 
versal sway  of  God  which  the  world  contains 
(Psalm  139)  himself  believed  in  a  God  whose 
dominion  ended  with  the  bounds  of  a  petty 
state.  His  religion  had  place  for  a  household 
idol,  the  teraphim,  an  image  in  human  form.^ 
He  practiced  throughout  his  life  a  species  of 
divination  by  the  ephod,^  and  ascertained  the 
will  of  the  Almighty  by  a  priest's  manipulation 
of  a  sacred  lot.  There  came  famine  upon  the 
land.'*  They  inquired  of  God  the  cause,  and 
the  answer  came,  It  is  for  Saul  and  his  bloody 
house,  and  his  violated  covenant  with  the 
Gibeonites.  They  asked  the  men  of  Gibeon 
what  should  be  the  atonement.  Blood  must  pay 
for  blood,  and  they  hanged  seven  of  the  sons  of 

^  I  Sam.  26  19  f.  3  I  Sam.  23  2,  6-13^  2  Sam.  21  i  S. 

2  I  Sam.  19  13'  *  2  Sam.  21  1-14. 


THE   RELIGION   OF   ISRAEL  103 

Saul  before  the  Lord  at  Gibeah,  among  them  the 
two  sons  of  Rizpah  the  concubine.  And  Riz- 
pah  the  daughter  of  Aiah  spread  sackcloth  on 
the  rock  at  Gibeah,  and  against  vultures  of  the 
air  by  day  and  beasts  of  the  field  in  the  lonely 
night  she  guarded  the  bodies  of  her  dead,  as 
week  after  week  the  corpses  hung  on  their 
crosses  before  David's  God,  till  the  merciful 
heaven  poured  out  its  rain.  "Then  was  God 
propitiated  for  His  land." 

Such  was  the  God  of  Israel,  and  such  was 
Israel's  religion,  at  the  establishment  of  the 
monarchy  one  thousand  years  before  the  Chris- 
tian era ;  —  a  provincial  deity,  served  by  tera- 
phim  and  ephod,  declaring  his  will  to  diviners, 
and  rendered  kindly  by  the  vigil  of  Rizpah 
the  daughter  of  Aiah  over  the  bodies  of  her 
sons. 

It  was  this  primitive  faith  that  entered  upon 
a  struggle  for  a  foothold  in  Palestine  with  the 
established  religion  of  the  land,  a  religion  in- 
wrought into  the  customs  and  life  which  the 
new  people  were  forced  to  adopt,  which  had  its 
sanctuary  on  every  high  hill  and  under  every 


104  THE  CHRISTIAN  FAITH 

green  tree,  which  professed  to  control  the  fer- 
tility of  the  field  and  the  increase  of  the  flock. 
The  conquerors  received  from  the  conquered 
their  culture  and  civilization,  even  their  lan- 
guage —  for  Hebrew  is  the  language  of  Canaan, 
not  the  Aramcean  of  the  desert.  Israel  left 
off  the  manner  of  nomads,  dwelt  in  cities  like 
the  Canaanites,  tilled  the  fields,  held  vintage 
feasts,  and  threatened  in  all  things  to  become 
but  Canaanites  of  another  blood.  Canaanite 
religion  also  impressed  itself  upon  the  wor- 
shippers of  the  God  of  Sinai  in  more  than  one 
particular.  The  great  Jewish  feasts  are  of 
Canaanite  origin.  The  sacred  places  of  He- 
brew tradition,  from  Hebron  and  Jerusalem 
down,  were  old-time  sanctuaries  of  Canaanite 
divinities.  And  when  they  built  the  temple 
of  the  desert  God  in  Jerusalem,  they  included 
in  the  structure  the  houses  of  the  sodomite, 
and  the  apartments  of  the  women  who  made 
coverings  for  the  Asherah,  the  most  loathsome 
abominations  of  the  Canaanitic  cultus.^ 
A  primitive  faith  of  a  rude,  untutored  people, 

^  I  Kings  IS  12^  2  2  46. 


THE   RELIGION   OF   ISRAEL  105 

devotion  to  a  God  of  storm  and  war,  a  blending 
in  life  and  institutions  with  a  people  of  foul 
and  ignoble  worship,  —  how  came  there  from 
this  beginning  the  faith  of  righteousness,  of  the 
God  of  all  nations  and  of  the  earth  and  heaven, 
which  we  know  as  the  religion  of  Israel  ?  And 
how  came  this  purer  faith  to  have  such  strength 
and  penetration  to  the  heart  of  Israel  that  it 
had  to  be  thought  back  into  the  life  of  the  early 
times,  and  those  times  interpreted  according 
to  its  standards,  so  that  the  story  of  the  reality 
of  the  primitive  religion  of  Israel  is  left  but 
faintly  in  the  record,  unseen  by  popular  reading 
even  to  this  day,  and  only  spread  to  open  view 
by  patient  research  and  careful  reconstruction  ? 
The  faith  of  Israel,  the  religion  of  the  God 
of  righteousness,  was  the  outcome  of  Israel's 
history  and  Israel's  men,  the  reaction  in  the 
souls  of  mighty  men  from  the  happenings  of 
a  stirring  and  dreadful  time.  Without  the 
deeds,  the  marching  of  great  armies,  the  flam- 
ing of  captured  cities,  the  deportations  of  peo- 
ples, the  souls  of  the  men  would  never  have 
stirred  to  the  grip  of  the  eternal  truth ;  without 


I06  THE  CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

the  men,  the  history  would  have  gone  by  and 
left  a  waste  like  Charchemish  and  Heshbon, 
voiceless  to  this  day  and  still,  sending  forth  no 
lesson  and  adding  no  item  of  knowledge  of  the 
ways  of  God  upon  the  earth. 

Some  three  centuries  after  Israel  had  brought 
its  war  God  into  the  mountain  range  of  Syria, 
and  Israel  and  Canaan  learned  to  go  friendly 
together  to  the  high  altars  of  Baal,  there  ap- 
peared on  the  horizon  a  new  enemy,  boding 
fearful  peril  to  the  little  people  long  devastated 
by  internal  strife  and  by  combat  with  petty 
nations  like  itself.  The  new  foe  was  the 
Assyrian,  from  his  mighty  empire  in  the  two- 
river  country  to  the  east.  He  was  not  like  the 
Midianite,  who  raided  a  few  cattle,  sacked 
a  village  or  two,  and  disappeared  with  his 
plunder  into  the  desert.  He  resembled  not  the 
Moabite,  nor  the  children  of  Ammon,  whose 
ambition  was  satisfied  in  the  wresting  of  border 
towns.  His  home  was  not  like  that  of  the  Phil- 
istines, a  short  narrow  line  of  sea-coast.  From 
his  river  capital  he  dominated  the  most  exten- 
sive and  wealthy  territory  of  the  world,  the  seat 


THE   RELIGION   OF   ISRAEL  107 

of  its  oldest  civilizations;  the  ambition  of 
a  world  empire  was  in  his  heart,  and  he  set 
about  world  conquest,  with  patience  equal  to 
his  cruelty,  with  deliberation  equal  to  his 
might.  The  home  of  Israel  was  in  the  way 
between  him  and  the  sea.  He  would  be  master 
of  the  coast,  and  destroy  the  outposts  of  Egypt 
to  the  south.  Relentlessly  he  fell  upon  the 
kingdoms  of  northern  Syria.  Hamath,  Seph- 
arvaim,  Damascus,  crumbled  before  his  ar- 
mies. He  was  the  mightiest  fighter  known  to 
ancient  times,  and  the  scythed  chariot,  mowing 
across  a  field  of  infantry,  is  his  fitting  symbol. 

''None  is  weary,  none  stumble  among  them: 
the  girdle  of  their  loins  is  never  loosed,  nor  the 
latchet  of  their  shoes  broken:  their  horses' 
hoofs  are  like  flint,  and  their  wheels  like  a  whirl- 
wind; and  they  roar  like  young  lions,  and 
lay  hold  of  prey,  and  carry  it  away  safe,  and 
there  is  none  to  deliver."  ^ 

The  Assyrians  were  the  extirpators  of  peoples. 
They  carried  them  away  captive,  men,  women, 
and  children,  and  "planted  them"  —  to  use 
^Is.  5  27ff. 


I08  THE    CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

their  own  phrase  —  in  far-away  cities,  scattering 
and  mixing  people  of  all  races  and  languages 
and  religions,  and  utterly  blotting  out  nations 
and  gods.  They  blotted  out  gods,  because  for 
these  peoples  home  and  country  and  god  were 
inextricably  wrought  together.  They  fought 
for  god  and  native  land,  and  if  they  lost  their 
land,  they  lost  with  it  their  god.  We  may  not 
understand  this  feeling,  but  in  western  Asia, 
in  the  centuries  of  Assyria's  rise,  there  was  no 
other  conception  of  deity  than  that  of  a  being 
attached  to  a  particular  people  in  its  particular 
home,  whose  very  existence  was  bound  up  with 
that  nation  and  that  land.  To  these  tribal,  lo- 
calized divinities,  the  petty  Syrian  states  prayed 
passionately  for  deliverance  from  the  Assyrian. 
But  the  gods  of  Hamath  did  not  save  Hamath, 
and  the  men  of  Hamath  threw  them  to  the 
rubbish  heap.  The  gods  of  Sepharvaim  did 
not  save  Sepharvaim,  and  there  arose  there- 
after none  to  do  them  honor.  Now  Israel 
went  down  before  the  Assyrian,  in  the  Assyrian's 
good  time,  and  the  jackals  ran  in  the  streets  of 
Samaria.     But  what  saved  Samaria's  God  from 


THE   RELIGION   OF   ISRAEL  109 

the  rubbish  heap,  along  with  the  gods  of  Ha- 
math  and  Sepharvaim? 

It  was  the  work  of  the  spirit  of  righteousness 
in  the  hearts  of  a  few  men,  whose  labors  for 
their  own  time  seemed  an  absolute  failure, 
but  whose  mighty  speech,  glowing  in  the  clear 
light  of  truth,  changed  utterly  the  character 
of  the  God  whom  Israel  worshipped.  A  herds- 
man of  Tekoa  left  his  flocks  and  cast  aside  his 
pruning  shears,  and  made  his  way  to  the  altar 
of  Israel's  God  at  Bethel,  the  ancient  sanctuary 
of  Jacob.  How  careful  was  the  ritual  there! 
The  feasts  at  the  turning  of  the  moon,  and  the 
well-appointed  sacrifices !  How  clear  rose  the 
voice  of  song  to  heaven,  and  the  melody  of 
viols !  Sacrifices  every  morning,  and  tithes 
every  three  days !  But  they  sold  the  righteous 
for  silver,  and  the  needy  for  a  pair  of  shoes ! 
they  trampled  upon  the  poor,  and  with  exac- 
tions built  houses  of  hewn  stone !  they  turned 
justice  into  gall,  and  the  cry  of  the  oppressed 
into  wormwood  !  they  practised  harlotry  in  the 
temple,  father  and  son  together,  in  the  honor 
of  their  God  !^ 

*  Amos  2  6.  7,  s  7.  ". 


no  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

They  were  princes  and  mighty  men,  but 
against  them  stood  the  Tekoan  herdsman,  alone 
with  righteousness,  and  proclaimed  against 
their  altar,  and  cursed  their  solemn  assemblies. 
It  was  not  the  raving  and  ranting  of  the  pro- 
fessional prophet.*  There  was  clear-held  con- 
viction behind  the  utterance  of  Amos.  He  had 
found  God  anew  in  righteousness.  He  saw 
the  doom  of  Samaria  and  her  altars  as  clearly 
as  if  the  Assyrian's  work  were  already  done. 
And  what  then?  Should  Jehovah  die? 
Should  one  say  —  where  are  the  Gods  of  Sa- 
maria ?  Jehovah  lived  —  lived  in  the  burning 
feeling  of  right  in  the  prophet's  own  soul! 
That  was  God;  Israel's  God!  the  right  that 
enabled  him  to  stand  forth  without  precedent 
and  without  authority  and  declare  the  religion 
of  the  king  unholy,  and  the  altars  polluted  upon 
which  men  spread  the  garments  of  the  poor. 
There  was  a  spirit  in  his  soul,  there  was  a  truth 
that  came  resistless  to  his  lips ;  and  he  believed  it 
for  God,  though  his  fathers  went  to  an  ephod  for 
God,  and  sought  Him  in  teraphim  and  asherah. 

^  Amos  7  14. 


THE   RELIGION   OF   ISRAEL  in 

To  this  God  Amos  applied  all  the  greatness 
which  the  history  of  his  time  brought  into  view. 
The  idea  of  a  world  empire,  a  world  power, 
was  in  the  heart  of  the  Assyrian.  For  Israel 
it  was  something  new.  There  had  been  Moab, 
and  Ammon,  and  petty  state  after  petty  state. 
Each  had  its  god,  and  the  dominion  of  each 
god  ceased  at  the  national  border.  There  was 
no  outlook  for  thought,  no  elevation  for  the 
spirit,  no  fair,  far  lands  for  the  imagination. 
The  horizon's  limit  was  a  wall  unto  the  souls 
of  men,  and  within  its  narrow  confines  they 
lived  their  narrow  life. 

The  Assyrian  world  idea  made  possible  new 
visions.  First  to  catch  them  was  the  herdsman 
prophet.  The  God  of  his  people's  cultus  was 
to  go  into  captivity  with  his  people.  If,  then, 
the  God  of  his  fathers  was  dead,  who  was 
the  God  who  spoke  within  him?  The  herds- 
man prophet  took  the  world  idea,  and  fused  it 
with  the  righteousness  that  burned  in  his  heart, 
and  Jehovah,  God  of  Israel,  whom  men  served 
with  sodomites  in  the  temple  at  Jerusalem, 
whom  David  feared  he  would  lose  if  he  went 


112  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

ten  miles  over  the  border  into  Philistia,  came 
forth  in  Amos  the  God  of  all  the  earth,^  the 
right  that  is  over  all  peoples,  and  whose  domin- 
ion is  from  sea  to  sea. 

We  tell  our  children  the  greatness  of  Colum- 
bus, who,  despite  the  scorn  of  kings  and  the 
ridicule  of  the  wise,  wrought  his  faith  into  deed 
and  discovered  a  new  world.  We  call  James 
Watt  a  great  benefactor,  in  that  he  invented  the 
condensing  steam-engine,  and  opened  up  the 
era  of  modern  transportation.  We  have  high 
praise  for  Franklin,  who  called  down  lightning 
from  the  clouds,  and  started  the  electrical  de- 
velopment by  which  thought  flashes  across 
empires  and  under  leagues  of  sea.  But  man- 
hood is  more  than  engines  and  wires  and  dyna- 
mos, and  it  is  the  story  of  a  greater  day  when 
one  describes  the  prophet  Amos  before  the  altar 
of  Bethel,^  commanding  to  strike  the  chapiter 
of  the  god  of  a  tiny  district  of  the  earth,  who 
had  become  a  god  of  oppression  and  falsehood, 
that  on  the  ruins  of  his  desecrated  altar,  and 
from  the  wreck  of  an  immoral  nation,  there 

^  Amos  58.  2  Amos  9  i. 


THE   RELIGION   OF   ISRAEL  113 

might  arise  the  God  of  the  poor  and  the  God 
of  the  right,  who  maketh  the  Pleiades  and 
Orion/  and  turneth  the  shadow  of  death  into 
the  morning,  and  maketh  the  day  dark  with 
night:  that  calleth  for  the  waters  of  the  sea, 
and  poureth  them  out  upon  the  face  of  the  earth : 
the  Lord  is  His  name ! 

The  name  is  the  same  as  that  of  the  deity 
before  whom  Jephthah  murdered  his  daughter, 
and  Rizpah  watched  her  dead ;  but  in  the  char- 
acter of  the  deity  what  resemblance  can  you 
discover?  The  difference  was  wrought  chiefly 
in  the  soul  of  Amos  of  Tekoa,  who  took  heed 
to  the  righteousness  that  thrilled  irresistible 
within  him,  and  who  put  that  righteousness 
on  the  world  throne  the  great  Assyrian  enabled 
him  to  conceive.  Amos  did  not  discover  the 
rightness  of  single  deeds,  for  that  knowledge  is 
far  older:  but  he  was  the  first  to  make  clear 
the  rightness  that  sitteth  upon  the  circle  of  the 
earth,  the  power  that  commands  unto  good, 
who  administers  the  universe,  unto  whom  men 
feebly  reach  in  all  idols  and  liturgies. 

^  Amos  5  8. 


114  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

Thus  our  sketch  of  the  history  of  Israel's 
religion  in  its  earlier  and  obscurer  years  has 
led  us  to  the  truth  which  lies  at  the  foundation 
of  all  worthy  religious  belief,  the  doctrine  of 
ethical  monotheism.  The  story  enables  us,  not 
merely  to  do  justice  to  the  herdsman  prophet, 
and  to  explain  how  one  of  the  world's  greatest 
spiritual  achievements  was  wrought,  but  also 
to  grasp  the  essential  nature  of  religion  itself. 

It  was  a  saying  of  Renan  that  Christianity 
has  always  appeared  decadent  to  the  eyes  of 
its  contemporaries.  He  might  have  said  that 
religion  itself  has  seemed  continually  to  face 
its  dying  day.  Yet  religion  lives,  and  men  still 
have  place  in  their  lives  for  thoughts  of  God. 
Why  the  ineradicableness  of  what  Heraclitus 
called  the  noble  disease?  It  is  because  of  the 
indestructibleness  of  the  feeling  of  right  in  the 
human  breast,  as  Amos  experienced  it ;  in  other 
words,  because  of  the  inevitableness  of  duty, 
and  because  given  duty,  God  and  His  worship 
are  inevitable. 

Obligation  is  a  force  that  holds.  It  comes 
not  with  self-interest ;  it  ceases  not  when  pleas- 


THE   RELIGION   OF   ISRAEL  1 15 

ure  is  on  the  other  side.  It  frames  command- 
ments that  will  not  budge,  which  logic  cannot 
stir,  and  entreaties  cannot  change.  Duty  and 
conscience  are  the  shadow  of  ourself,  dogging 
our  every  moment  while  there  is  still  an  atom 
of  manhood  left  within  us. 

In  the  soul  life  deep  within,  the  right  is  the 
power  over  everything,  the  might  beyond  all 
mights.  Duty  comes  without  our  consent,  pro- 
claims no  theory  of  its  origin,  refuses  often  to 
answer  why,  or  what  for,  but  majestic  like  a 
king  it  rises  to  confront  us,  to  press  its  claims 
of  kingship  untiring  till  we  die.  It  wakeneth 
us  morning  by  morning,  and,  crowned  and 
sceptred,  calls  us  to  its  service.  The  will  unto 
good,  the  will  that  strives  in  our  own  life  for 
good,  is  the  strongest  reality  of  which  we  have 
any  knowledge.  And  when  we  show  ourselves 
strong  enough  to  disobey,  and  place  our  life 
against  the  mandate  of  the  king  of  spirits,  then 
in  His  seeming  failure  does  He  show  himself 
most  a  king,  and  in  the  smitings  of  conscience, 
the  shame  of  a  manhood  that  is  less  than  itself, 
there  is  the  tribute  of  sorrow  to  a  disobeyed 


Il6  THE  CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

monarch  who  is  monarch  still.  Though  I 
make  my  bed  in  hell,  behold  Thou  art  there. 

One  passes  without  notice  to  the  language  of 
religion.  Morals  lead  to  religion.^  In  the  right 
which  commands  us  we  have  to  do  with  a  being 
who  seems  almighty.  Duty  presses  home  like 
the  will  of  the  Might  over  all.  The  right  asks 
not  permission  of  a  superior,  seeks  not  else- 
where consent  as  to  what  shall  be  its  word  and 
how  it  shall  enforce  it,  takes  no  heed  to  pleas 
of  other  interests  and  other  claimants  to  one's 
allegiance.  The  right  is  first,  and  abides  first, 
the  one  eternal  fixed  reality  of  our  spiritual 
manhood.     And  what  is  that  but  God? 

In  the  summer  of  1904  they  brought  up  rotten 
cork  from  the  waters  of  the  East  River  around 
the  bodies  of  greed-murdered  children,  and 
fire-hose  flimsy  as  muslin  from  the  ship  of  a 
thousand  dead.  A  few  months  before,  Chicago 
mourned  over  the  holocaust  of  children  at  the 
burning  of  the  Iroquois  Theatre,  children  mur- 

*  "  Die  Moral  fiihrt  unausbleiblich  zur  Religion."  Kant: 
"  Die  Religion  innerhalb  der  Grenzen  der  blossen  Ver- 
nunft,"  p.  7  (Kirchmann).  For  an  excellent  statement  in 
English  cf.  Felix  Adler:  "  The  Religion  of  Duty." 


THE   RELIGION   OF   ISRAEL  117 

dered  by  broken  laws,  fire-protections  that 
would  not  work,  doors  that  opened  in.  That 
rotten  cork  was  wrong ;  it  was  fraud  and  deceit. 
That  kind  of  thing  has  no  justification;  the 
command  against  it  has  resistless  authority: 
that  is,  there  is  some  sort  of  a  power  felt  in 
men's  souls  that  commands  the  good  and  con- 
demns the  wrong;  and  that  is,  there  is  a  God 
in  the  right  and  behind  the  right,  a  God  with 
whom  we  and  all  men  have  to  do,  and  who  has 
something  to  do  with  us  every  time  we  put  forth 
our  hand  to  the  slightest  deed. 

The  man  of  Tekoa  declared  God  upon  no 
other  authority  than  the  truth  that  burned  in 
his  soul.  There  need  be  no  other.  What  are 
authorities  and  arguments  beside  Him  who  calls 
for  righteousness  as  a  flood  of  waters  and  justice 
as  a  mighty  stream?  God  is  not  the  God  of 
the  dead,  but  of  the  living,  of  the  living  word 
unto  good,  of  the  living  men  in  whom  the  strug- 
gle of  the  right  never  ceases.  They  find  Him 
now  whose  life  is  earnest,  though  not  in  the 
petty  questions  which  men  try,  nor  in  the  labored 
proofs  of  another  age,  but  in  the  living  world  of 


Il8  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

action,  where  right  is  might,  the  heart's  one 
might,  and  where  conscience  declares  the  glory 
of  God  and  righteous  men  show  forth  His 
handiwork. 

There  is  ignorance  both  wide  and  deep  in  the 
present  day,  even  on  the  part  of  the  young  men 
and  women  of  our  colleges,  of  the  history  and 
the  literature  of  the  sacred  Scriptures.  The 
incalculable  loss  in  culture  and  character  goes 
without  saying.  If  there  shall  be  revival  of 
Biblical  knowledge  among  educated  youth,  it 
must  be  that  of  Biblical  science,  equal  in  schol- 
arship and  scientific  thoroughness  with  the 
painstaking  thoroughness  which  now  honors 
the  natural  sciences.  We  cannot  have  man- 
hood in  the  laboratory  and  gush  in  the  Young 
Men's  Christian  Association.  Or  if  we  do,  the 
men  will  take  the  laboratory,  to  their  honor, 
and  we  shall  have  men  in  the  laboratory  worthy 
of  the  most  thorough  respect  for  their  devotion 
to  truth,  their  regard  for  fact,  but  who  are  in- 
competent and  helpless  in  some  of  the  deeper 
and  finer  things  of  life. 

"There  is  a  spirit  in  man^  and  the  breath  of 


THE   RELIGION    OF   ISRAEL  119 

the  Almighty  giveth  him  understanding."  That 
spirit  is  worthy  of  investigation :  its  workings 
in  the  past  deserve  to  be  traced ;  and  if  traced 
at  all  for  men  of  the  student  soul,  they  must  be 
traced  by  methods  to  which  students  are  accus- 
tomed. Never  did  the  spirit  in  man  work 
more  grandly,  nor  to  better  purpose,  than  in  the 
old  Hebrew  days.  Then  let  the  young  men 
know  how  a  trolley  car  runs,  if  they  want  to, 
and  the  superiorities  of  a  turbine  wheel; 
let  them  by  all  means  learn  — 

"  the  glory  that  was  Greece 
And  the  grandeur  that  was  Rome  "; 

but  let  them  also,  in  the  name  of  the  manhood 
that  is  more  than  meat,  in  the  name  of  charac- 
ter, honor,  and  worth  of  spirit  —  let  them  also 
thrill  with  Amos  and  Isaiah  at  the  deeds  of  the 
God  of  the  Pleiades,  and  let  them  grow  quiet 
and  reverent,  and  clothe  themselves  with  dig- 
nity and  worth,  under  the  gentle  instruction  of 
that  history  that  was  lived  more  than  any  other 
in  the  secret  place  of  the  Most  High,  and  which 
drew  in  its  inspiration  while  under  the  very 
shadow  of  the  Almighty. 


CHAPTER  V 

THE    HEIGHTENING    OF    TRADITION     IN 
THE   OLD   TESTAMENT 

It  may  carelessly  be  imagined  that  zeal  in 
writing  is  quite  a  modern  disease,  and  that  only 
since  the  printing-press,  and  especially  since  the 
great  improvements  in  it  and  in  the  manu- 
facture of  paper,  has  there  occurred  anything 
like  a  Noachic  deluge  of  literature.  It  is 
from  the  Old  Testament,  however,  that  the 
proverb  comes  to  us :  "Of  making  many  books 
there  is  no  end."  ^  Receipts  and  contracts  were 
as  prevalent  in  Babylonia  in  the  time  of  Moses 
as  drafts  and  checks  are  with  us  to-day, 
and  the  correspondence  unearthed  at  Tell-el- 
Amarna  demonstrates  that  stylus  was  put  to  clay 
in  Old  Testament  times  with  as  little  provoca- 
tion as  we  now  put  pen  to  paper.  It  would  be 
most  remarkable,  therefore,  if  the  great  events 
of  Hebrew  history  had  found  but  one  narrator 

»  ECC.  12  ". 

1 20 


HEIGHTENING   OF  TRADITION        121 

in  each  period,  and  if  all  testimony  to  important 
happenings  had  perished,  save  that  of  one  man 
at  each  crisis,  Moses  at  the  exodus,  Joshua  at 
the  conquest,  and  so  on.  The  reasonable 
expectation  is  that  many  took  in  hand  to  write 
the  deeds  that  were  fulfilled  among  them,  and 
that,  as  in  the  case  of  the  New  Testament, 
they  were  men  of  different  points  of  view. 

If,  in  fact,  there  were  several  authors  who 
recorded  the  mighty  deeds  of  Israel's  early  his- 
tory, and  if  their  works  have  been  preserved, 
the  conclusion  must  be  that  they  have  been 
joined  together  and  united  under  common 
titles  in  our  present  Bible.  We  are  not  at  all 
accustomed  to  such  literary  procedure.  The 
lives  of  Washington  have  not  been  pieced  to- 
gether, and  doubtless  never  will  be.  Herodo- 
tus and  Xenophon,  Horace  and  Juvenal, 
Chaucer  and  Piers  Plowman,  are  as  separate 
and  distinct  as  Longfellow  and  Whittier.  We 
are  not  to  blame,  therefore,  for  a  little  natural 
incredulity  when  we  are  told,  for  example,  that 
Exodus  14,  which  narrates  the  deliverance  at 
the  Red  Sea,  was  at  one  time  pieced  together 


122  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

from  three  different  documents,  one  written  in 
Judaea  about  850  B.C.,  another  in  Ephraim  a 
century  later,  and  the  third  not  until  about  500 
B.C.,  some  six  hundred  years  after  the  events 
it  describes. 

But  Arabic  historians  compose  their  works 
in  precisely  that  fashion,  adopting  large  sec- 
tions of  previous  writings  and  treating  their 
sources  with  great  freedom.  The  instance  of 
Tatian,  whose  piecework  "  Diatessaron  "  came 
to  be  the  only  Gospel  the  churches  of  entire  dis- 
tricts possessed,  proves  that  the  documentary 
theory  of  the  origin  of  large  portions  of  the 
Old  Testament  is  by  no  means  improbable. 

If  it  be  admitted  that  several  authors  had  to 
do  with  the  composition  of  these  narratives, 
and  that  their  works  can  be  disentangled,  a 
striking  difference  of  religious  conception  comes 
to  light.  The  divergences  are  not  merely  in 
vocabulary  and  style,  but  more  especially  in 
the  views  that  are  taken  of  the  manner  of  God's 
influence  upon  human  life,  and  of  that  which 
should  be  first  and  emphatic  in  the  relation  of 
man  to  God.     Particularly  do  the  later  writings 


HEIGHTENING   OF   TRADITION        123 

have  a  tendency  to  make  unique  and  dramatic 
the  acts  of  God,  and  so  to  increase  the  religious 
element  and  to  heighten  the  tradition. 

Thus,  in  the  story  of  the  deliverance  at  the 
Red  Sea,^  the  earliest  writer  records  that  the 
Lord  caused  the  sea  to  go  back  by  a  strong  east 
wind  all  the  night.  Considering  the  locality, 
which  was  an  arm  of  the  Red  Sea,  since  quite 
filled  in  with  sand,  and  also  the  mention  of  the 
east  wind,  we  may  say  that  this  narrative  has  in 
mind  an  unusual  event,  in  the  feeling  of  the 
writer  a  most  providential  event,  wrought  of 
God  for  His  people,  but  not  a  non-natural  occur- 
rence. A  parallel  might  be  the  freezing  of  the 
North  River  in  an  exceptionally  cold  winter, 
which  would  be  unusual,  and  might  be  hailed 
by  some  in  certain  circumstances  as  providen- 
tial, but  would  not  imply  departure  from  the 
usual  order  of  things. 

In  the  account  next  later,  Moses  is  said  to 
lift  up  his  staff  and  divide  the  waters.  No  men- 
tion is  made  of  the  wind,  and  the  act  is  entirely 
non-natural,  but  there  is  no  effort  to  heighten 

^  Exodus  14. 


124  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

the  miracle  beyond  the  crossing  of  the  Israelites 
and  the  discomfiture  of  the  Egyptians. 

In  the  narrative  latest  of  all  the  wonder  is 
performed  by  Moses  stretching  out  his  hand 
over  the  sea,  and  the  waters  are  piled  up  like 
a  wall  on  either  side,  the  water  losing  its  natural 
property  until  the  Hebrews  pass  through,  when 
again  at  the  extension  of  Moses'  hand  the  sea 
returns  over  the  Egyptians.  According  to  this 
writer  both  Pharaoh  and  all  his  chariots  and 
all  his  horsemen  are  destroyed,  while  in  the 
earlier  accounts  a  small  division  of  the  army  of 
that  vast  empire  would  satisfy  the  terms  of  the 
narrative. 

The  ordinary  procedure  in  picturing  to  one's 
self  what  actually  took  place  is  to  combine  the 
features  of  all  three  accounts,  precisely  as  we 
find  them  in  the  Bible :  to  think  of  the  east  wind 
blowing  and  Moses  holding  out  his  staff,  and 
also  his  hand ;  the  waters  going  back  by  force 
of  the  wind,  and  yet  forming  a  perpendicular 
wall  on  both  sides  of  a  narrow  passage.  Popu- 
lar imagination  unites  also  the  six  hundred 
chariots  of  one  clause  with  all  Pharaoh's  char- 


HEIGHTENING   OF   TRADITION        125 

iots  in  the  next,  without  realizing  the  difficulty 
of  supposing  that  a  world  empire  had  only  six 
hundred  chariots,  and  that  it  assembled  all  its 
forces  to  pursue  escaping  slaves. 

It  should  seem  very  clear,  however,  that  we 
have  here  a  case  of  heightening  of  tradition, 
and  that  it  should  be  our  privilege  —  indeed, 
that  it  is  our  duty  —  to  make  choice  of  the  ear- 
liest and  simplest  narrative,  and  to  interpret  the 
others  as  the  understanding  of  the  same  occur- 
rence which  prevailed  in  later  years.  One 
should  have  the  right  to  stand  by  the  under- 
standing of  the  matter  which  obtained  when  the 
event  was  freshest  in  men's  memories,  and  that 
without  the  slightest  implication  of  an  evil  heart 
of  unbelief. 

Similar  discretion  should  be  exercised  in  the 
interpretation  of  the  stories  of  the  plagues  of 
Egypt. ^  If  one  read  by  itself  the  earliest  narra- 
tive, he  is  in  the  presence  of  natural  phenomena, 
such  as  occur  with  more  or  less  frequency  in 
that  land.  It  is  not  an  unheard-of  thing  for 
the  water  of  the  Nile  to  become  foul,  and  of  a 
*  Exodus  7  Q. 


126  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

reddish  tinge,  so  that  fish  die  and  frogs  and  flies 
swarm  everywhere,  and  these  disasters  are  fol- 
lowed, naturally,  by  pestilence  among  animals 
and  men.  It  is  in  the  latest  narrative  that  we 
read  that  not  only  the  Nile,  but  the  waters  of 
Egypt,  the  rivers,  the  canals,  the  pools  and  all 
their  reservoirs,  became  blood,  so  that  there 
was  blood  throughout  all  the  land  of  Egypt, 
both  in  vessels  of  wood  and  in  vessels  of  stone. 
It  is  the  same  late  account  which  testifies  that 
Aaron  smote  with  his  staff  the  dust  of  the  earth, 
and  the  dust  of  the  earth  became  lice  through- 
out all  the  land  of  Egypt;  also  that  Aaron 
took  handfuls  of  furnace  soot,  sprinkled  it 
toward  heaven,  and  it  became  boils,  breaking 
forth  with  blisters  upon  both  man  and  beast. 
Of  course  it  is  possible  to  combine  the  narra- 
tives, or,  rather,  not  to  admit  that  there  are  two, 
and  think  of  the  Nile  becoming  red,  and  also  of 
reservoirs  and  vessels  filled  with  blood;  to 
imagine  a  very  severe  pest  upon  cattle,  and  also 
that  dust  from  the  hands  of  a  man  caused  boils 
on  man  and  beast  in  all  the  great  empire  of 
Egypt.     But  it  is  certainly  one's  right  to  choose 


HEIGHTENING   OF   TRADITION        127 

the  simpler  story,  and  interpret  the  history 
accordingly,  and  this  only  can  save  the  credi- 
bility of  the  narrative  for  the  modern  man. 

An  instance  of  the  heightening  of  Old  Testa- 
ment tradition,  where  the  untrained  reader  can 
distinguish  the  documents  for  himself,  is  the 
celebrated  account  of  the  sun  standing  still 
by  command  of  Joshua  (Joshua  10  ^^ff.).  We 
read  that  Joshua  said  in  the  sight  of  Israel : — 

"Sun,  stand  thou  still  upon  Gibeon; 
And  thou,  Moon,  in  the  valley  of  Aijalon. 
And  the  sun  stood  still,  and  the  moon  stayed, 
Until  the  nation  had  avenged  themselves  of  their 


"Is  not  this  written,"  the  writer  adds,  "in 
the  book  of  Jashar?"  It  was  an  old  poetic 
fragment,  which  he  took  from  a  book  far  older 
than  his  time,  which,  of  course,  has  long  since 
perished.  In  enthusiastic  transport  the  poet 
commands  the  sun  and  gives  orders  to  the  moon, 
and  in  the  thrill  of  victory  he  feels  that  his 
commandments  are  obeyed.  No  more  than 
in  the  case  of  the  stars  fighting  against  Sisera 


128  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

(Judges  5)  do  we  need  to  suppose  departure 
of  the  heavenly  bodies  from  their  orbits.  But 
the  less  enthusiastic  prose  narrator  of  Joshua 
12  does  not  understand  the  poetic  exuberance 
of  the  book  of  Jashar,  and  he  interprets  the 
matter  thus :  — 

"And  the  sun  stayed  in  the  midst  of  the  heaven, 
and  hasted  not  to  go  down  about  a  whole  day.  And 
there  was  no  day  like  that  before  it  or  after  it,  that 
Jehovah  hearkened  unto  the  voice  of  a  man." 

This  writer  makes  a  statement  on  the  basis 
of  the  book  of  Jashar,  and  appeals  to  a  quo- 
tation from  the  book  as  his  authority ;  but  most 
people  to-day  would  understand  his  quotation 
very  differently,  and  they  certainly  should  have 
the  privilege. 

These  three  instances  must  serve  as  exam- 
ples of  a  process  which  the  historical  books  of 
the  Old  Testament  witness  repeatedly,  that  of 
heightening  the  tradition,  increasing  the  spec- 
tacular and  marvellous  elements  in  it,  in  the 
progress  of  the  years.  The  things  in  the  Bible 
that  bother  people,  which  they  do  not  like  to 


HEIGHTENING   OF  TRADITION        129 

have  their  children  ask  about,  are  mostly  ele- 
ments of  the  later  biblical  tradition.  Writers 
whose  very  words  have  been  preserved  do  not 
present  awkward  questions.  When  we  catch 
the  mighty  spirit  of  Amos  denouncing  the  injus- 
tice and  oppression  of  his  time,  when  we  hear 
him  call  for  justice  because  they  have  sold  the 
righteous  for  silver  and  the  needy  for  a  pair  of 
shoes,  there  is  no  question  of  how  much  we  can 
manage  to  believe;  the  God  of  the  right  is 
speaking  in  words  we  know  we  must  believe. 
The  world  implied  by  the  direct  words  of  the 
prophets  is  our  own  world  of  to-day,  and  yet 
it  is  a  world  in  which  keen-visioned  men  see 
the  hand  of  God  ordering  events  for  His  chil- 
dren and  commanding  His  servants  in  the  way 
of  duty.  The  nearer  we  approach  to  eye- 
witness testimony  as  to  what  happened  in  the 
history  of  Israel,  the  more  closely  does  the  rec- 
ord conform  to  laws  and  usages  of  the  present 
world ;  but  despite  the  naturalness  of  events  the 
hand  of  God  is  seen  in  them. 

The  less  imaginative  writers,  whose  chapters 
are  less  colored  by  the  marvellous  and  the  sen- 


130  THE   CHRISTIAN   FAITH 

sational,  yet  who  are  alive  to  the  will  of  God 
in  the  acts  they  record,  are  in  reality  the  most 
pious.  There  are  some  men  who  can  see  no 
act  of  God  in  the  blowing  of  the  east  wind  all 
night ;  you  must  pile  the  waters  perpendicularly 
on  either  side  before  they  will  admit  that  God 
has  passed  that  way.  There  are  those  who  see 
no  action  of  the  spirit  in  the  foulness  of  a  river 
through  decaying  vegetation,  and  in  resulting 
plague  and  pestilence,  even  though  the  disaster 
cooperate  in  the  freeing  of  a  people,  but  they 
must  heighten  the  story  and  make  it  very  mar- 
vellous before  they  find  divinity  in  it.  The  poet 
of  the  flower  in  the  crannied  wall  was  more 
truly  devout  than  these. 

The  faith  of  the  earlier  writers,  who  told  the 
story  in  its  simplest  form  and  yet  told  it  as  the 
record  of  the  acts  of  God,  is  the  more  useful 
type  of  piety.  Faith  that  can  believe  when  it 
sees  crutches  in  piles  by  a  holy  spring  is  not 
much  needed.  In  the  first  place,  there  are  not 
many  cities  like  Lourdes:  and  in  the  second 
place,  those  who  go  to  them,  even  those  who 
are  healed,  do  not  seem  to  be  greatly  benefited 


HEIGHTENING   OF  TRADITION        131 

in  the  manhood  and  womanhood  which  the 
world  chiefly  needs.  The  faith  we  want  is  the 
faith  that  will  pray,  and  yet  send  for  the  doctor, 
and  be  very  careful  to  follow  the  doctor's  or- 
ders, and,  when  the  cure  is  accomplished,  while 
thanking  God  for  His  deliverance,  pay  the  doc- 
tor's bill  promptly  and  in  full.  Doubtless 
there  were  Israelites,  when  the  Egyptians  were 
dead  upon  the  seashore,  who  said,  "  It  was  only 
an  east  wind !  How  lucky  that  it  should  have 
come  up  just  when  we  wanted  to  cross,  and 
died  down  when  we  were  safely  over!" 

The  most  useful  man  is  neither  he  who  denies 
the  wind,  or  forgets  to  mention  it,  and  invents 
a  marvellous  story,  nor,  on  the  other  hand, 
he  who  says  it  was  only  the  wind  and  nothing 
more;  but  the  man  of  insight  on  the  deeper 
side  of  life,  who  exclaims  in  reverence,  "The 
Lord  caused  the  sea  to  go  back  by  a  strong  east 
wind ! " 

Discrimination  between  earlier  and  later 
narratives  is  thus  a  matter  of  supreme  impor- 
tance for  religious  belief.  Read  without  criti- 
cism, the  Scriptures  encourage  the  notion  that 


132  THE   CHRISTIAN  FAITH 

God  cannot  do  anything  in  this  world  except 
in  an  extraordinary  manner,  that  every  real  act 
of  God  constitutes  such  a  spectacle  as  we  are 
never  likely  to  see.  The  heightening  of  tradi- 
tion, especially  in  the  Old  Testament,  has 
blinded  the  eyes  of  men  to  the  God  who  works 
by  east  winds  and  through  changes  in  the  flow 
of  a  river,  and  has  implanted  in  many  minds  the 
very  vicious  notion  that  God  is  not  in  the  com- 
mon happenings  of  the  world,  and  that  the 
monotony  of  everyday  life  is  without  benefit 
from  His  presence. 

That  is  the  most  terrible  unbelief,  in  practical 
consequences,  of  which  one  can  be  guilty. 
How  trifling  is  unbelief  in  the  acts  of  God  in  the 
time  of  Moses  compared  with  inability  to  dis- 
cern His  present  commandments !  How  can 
one  learn  anything  at  all  of  the  Man  of  Naza- 
reth, who  drew  his  every  breath  in  the  living 
presence  of  God,  if  his  underlying  thought  be 
that  God  is  not  in  our  common  world  ! 

One  has  only  to  consider  these  practical 
consequences  of  the  discovery  of  the  heighten- 
ing of  Old  Testament  tradition  to  perceive  that 


HEIGHTENING   OF  TRADITION        133 

the  newer  knowledge  of  the  Scripture  is  not 
merely  a  theory  for  scholars,  but  rather  that  it 
is  a  gift  of  God  to  all  earnest  and  fearless  men, 
to  teach  them  how  God  really  worked  in  olden 
days,  that  they  may  thus  know  that  He  is  at 
work  to-day,  and  be  privileged  to  join  in  His 
work  with  all  their  strength. 


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